Proms Plus: Birds and Humans
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2018
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Helen Macdonald, author of H Is For Hawk and Tim Birkhead, Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield and author of Bird Sense, share their experiences of observing birds closely and their pick of writing inspired by real and fictional birds. Professor Birkhead’s recent research has been into the adaptive significance of egg shape in birds and Helen Macdonald won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award for her writing about the year she spent training a goshawk. Presenter: Lucy Powell
Producer: Jacqueline Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the Arts and Ideas podcast, which is recorded with an audience before one of the concerts |
| 0:38.5 | in this year's BBC proms. |
| 0:40.6 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:47.4 | Best gems of nature's cabinet, with dews of tropic morning wet, beloved of children, |
| 0:57.0 | bards and spring, oh birds, your perfect virtues bring. |
| 1:03.0 | So the great 19th century writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, described birds. |
| 1:08.0 | He just hints with that unlikely word cabinet, muscling in on an otherwise |
| 1:13.4 | ecstatic peon, at human collectors, taxidermists and scientists misuses of our feathered friends |
| 1:20.8 | alongside our abiding love of them. Our relationship with birds has always been both profound and ambiguous. |
| 1:29.3 | Because of their association with dawn and with the spring, birds often signify joy, warmth and love. |
| 1:36.3 | One of the oldest poems in the language from the 13th century begins, |
| 1:41.3 | Summer is a coming in, luda sing cuckoo. |
| 1:45.6 | The cuckoo's call is the very expression of the summer. |
| 1:49.9 | And yet, the hovering presence of a raven, crow or vulture |
| 1:54.5 | bespeak precisely the opposite ideas, solitude, death, and decay. |
| 2:05.4 | That grim, gliding keeper of appointments is how one 20th century poet described the vulture, a frown upon the sky. And a murder of crows menace Vincent |
| 2:13.1 | Van Gogh's bright, sunny wheatfield in a frenzy of bad omenry. In so many guises, the bird has remained one of the Mungov's bright, sunny wheatfield in a frenzy of bad omenry. |
| 2:23.2 | In so many guises, the bird has remained one of the most visible animals in our art and culture, |
| 2:28.3 | and I'm very much hoping that our guests today will help us to understand why that is. |
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