Today is Earth Day 2015, and Radio 3 has been tweeting its suggestions for suitable music.  Last Year's Earth Day was marked by a special performance of what the New York Times described as "the ultimate environmental piece" - Inuksuit by John Luther Adams.

Written for " between nine and ninety-nine percussionists" it is a piece for playing in the outdoors, and adapted for the environment in which it is to be heard.

At the other end of the scale, John Luther Adams's ethereal homage to the humble canyon wren (pictured) is featured in this Saturday's Hear and Now. Birdwatcher, guitarist and broadcaster Tom McKinney will be reviewing the latest CDs on BBC Radio 3's flagship contemporary music programme.

Click the button for programme details and, from Sunday for 30 days, to hear it again.

Outdoors, rather than focusing our attention inward, we are challenged to expand our awareness  .... to receive messages not only from the composer and the performers, but also from the larger world around us.

Fans of Adams will be able to experience a new outdoor work at this year's East Neuk Festival in June, along with a programme of literary events celebrating our profound connections with nature, landscape and seascape. See our What's On page for details.

Like NATURAL LIGHT, Tom McKinney's excellent blog also explores the connections between birds and music.

Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony underwent the longest, most difficult gestation of all his works. He began composing it during the late summer of 1914 but made slow progress, writing in his diary, “It is as if God had thrown down mosaic pieces from heaven’s floor and asked me to put them back as they were.”

By April 1915 he was struggling with the finale, searching in vain for the theme that would bring the great work to a fitting conclusion.  The problem was solved on the morning of 21st when inspiration finally came with the spring arrival of Finland’s national bird, the whooper swan.

Click the button to hear Stephen Johnson on Sibelius's 5th Symphony in BBC's Discovering Music series.

As part of celebrations for its 25th anniversary, Plantlife has launched a poll to find the nation’s favourite wild flower.

One in five of Britain’s wild flowers is under threat and the vote is an opportunity to highlight their plight.  As with the concurrent election for Britain’s national bird, I have had no hesitation which gets my vote. 

The bluebell has previously been voted Britain’s favourite flower, and it’s mine, too.  But tactical voters should also vote bluebell.  While you can find them in neighbouring countries, the classic bluebell wood is almost uniquely a British sight.  Between a quarter and a half of all the world’s bluebells are found in Britain and Ireland.

However, during my recently-completed two year secondment in North Norfolk, I found a significant acreage of bluebells in the Snettisham area that was contaminated through hybridisation with the rampant Spanish bluebell.  It is a problem reported from most parts of Britain.  The Spanish species is a garden favourite which readily escapes into the wild.  It is more invasive and more vigorous than our native species, and hybrids even more so.

I have found that whereas the common bluebell takes around three years to flower from seed, a Spanish bluebell plant will flower in its first year, so the rate at which the native plants can be genetically swamped is frightening.  Whatever your views on non-native plants’ “right” to grow wild, the fact is, the common bluebell is more beautiful, more scented, and more part of our cherished woodland landscape than its paler, more rugged-looking cousin.

Ospreys have returned to the proposed site of T in the Park festival at Strathallan Castle, and police are monitoring the nest site for fear of disturbance to this highly protected species.  Campaigners opposed to the festival taking place so close to the traditional nesting site of Scotland's conservation icon, have obtained video evidence that shows they have returned from their African wintering grounds.

The festival, which is due to feature acts such as The Prodigy, Kasabian, and Noel Gallagher, has been dogged by controversy since its proposed move there was announced last year. Hundreds of letters of objection and support have been sent to Perth and Kinross Council.  Tickets have been sold despite a decision on planning permission not being due until next month.

The RSPB and other conservation campaigners have criticised DF Concerts for being poorly organised and unprepared for the ospreys' return.  The organisation's tactic of erecting a crane by the nest site to scare the birds away from this site while an alternative site was constructed, has also been controversial.  As long as the birds were away in Africa, the nest site was not considered "active", the organisers argued, claiming that the move was therefore not against the law.

Now video obtained yesterday shows the birds' attachment to their usual nest site is too strong, and they appear to have returned.  If so, the concert organisers, and potentially concert-goers themselves, may face up to 6 months in prison and/or a £5000 fine.  DF Concerts have announced that the festival will still go ahead, but have not yet explained how they will achieve this within the law.  Experts have called for a 750 metre buffer zone around the nest.


RSPB Scotland said they “will continue to work with all parties to see if any contingencies might be available to allow the event to proceed and for the birds to be given the required space and freedom they require so they will enjoy a successful breeding season.”

A spokesperson for T in the Park said: “We can confirm that Osprey have returned to Strathallan.” They pledged to “liaise with the relevant organisations to ensure the protection of the birds,” and added: “we’d also like to assure fans that the festival will go ahead. The decision on our planning application will still be made in May and we remain confident that the event will take place at Strathallan.”

Vanessa Reid is a political ecologist focusing on food sovereignty, food waste and organic agriculture in the South West of England, proposing the need for radical systemic change within our current food and farming system: one which is becoming increasingly unsustainable, and unhealthy, for both planet and people. Based in Bristol, she is Co-Director of This is Rubbish, a community-interest company, aiming to communicate the preventable scale of food wasted in the UK, through policy research, community and arts led public events.

Vanessa will be working with farmers from the Cerne valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Dorset.  She is currently designing and creating an exhibition and research project on the future of milk in the UK as Cape Farewell’s 2015 Rural Artist in Residence.  Her blog will follow the progress of the project.

The Wild Network, the organisation set up by a range of bodies to promote stronger connections between children and nature, has adopted the #naturewords campaign, and are calling for nature words to be put back in the Oxford Junior Dictionary via an on-line petition.  They have also produced this video to draw attention to the lost words:

Meanwhile, Penguin, the publishers of Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, are inviting twitter users to suggest their favourite nature words in celebration of the language of landscape.

The Kingfisher's position is deemed by many just too hard to pin down.  Flashing blue when it suits, it has been known to turn, revealing a distinctly reddish tinge at times. The unknown factor is whether the kingfisher's recent expulsion from the Oxford Junior Dictionary will win a sympathy vote.

Not helping the robin's cause is the recent emergence of the aptly-named blue tit.  Described as the Boris Johnson of the bird world, the cheeky chappie opportunist is hoping to gather the crumbs should the garden bird tendency turn away from their long-time favourite.

The mute swan's supporters are said to be panicking beneath the surface as floating voters are presented with too many options.  Meanwhile, the barn owl may have been knocked back by comments that "there is something of the night" about it.  Jibes such as "you kip in the day" may prove counter-productive in former tawny heartlands, however.

It may all come down to head-to-head debates, when powers of oratory can swing the undecided.  Here the mellifluous blackbird can be expected to pick up a few votes, the wren being thought of by many as a bit of a windbag.  In any case, expect much huffin' and puffin' over the coming weeks.

The abirdabode exhibition opens at Gallery Oldham on Saturday 14th March at 1pm and runs until 2 May.  The exhibition is linked with an Art Bird Flock of over three hundred Art Birds created by visitors to Festival Oldham, Oldham Flower Festival, Well Good Arts Week and RSPB Dove Stone’s Discovery Sunday last month.  

The Art Bird Box Artists include kids from Dove Stone Youth Rangers, Barrier Breakers, Grassroots Community Project and Trinity House many of whom will be at the opening.  They have been blogging about the project in the run-up to its launch and the project website shows youngsters making bird boxes inspired by punk, cubism, hobbits and Disney.

Project curators Jacqui Symonds and Richard Dawson have been running a series of workshops and creative activities for abirdabode; exploring urban and rural habitats, working closely with Oldham Arts Development and the RSPB.



 

Margaret Atwood piled more pressure on the Oxford University Press in a surprise appearance at the Norfolk Festival of Nature on Saturday.  She gave an impromptu response to nature writer Mark Cocker’s address to festival goers, illustrated by a looped series of slides depicting nature words cut from the OJD.  She proposed that to ensure that words like acorn, bluebell, poppy and otter were not dismissed as irrelevant in children’s lives, a new book be produced that celebrated those words instead.

Mark Cocker had been speaking on the final day of the inaugural week of the Festival.  It is to be a year-round celebration of nature in the cultural life of the county, and of the country.  Starting with a week of literary, musical, visual and scientific exploration hosted by Gresham’s School, Holt, Festival events will tour the county hosted by organisations as diverse as the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, National Trust, RSPB, Writers’ Centre Norwich and Waveney and Blyth Arts.  The list of collaborators is expected to grow.

As Cocker spoke, his words were accompanied by a poignant exhibition of his own photographs, alphabetically cataloguing more than fifty lost nature words:  acorn, adder, bluebell, catkin....kingfisher, lark, magpie, newt, otter, poppy....

He then invited renowned Canadian novelist and Atwood’s partner, Graeme Gibson to respond.  His focus was on the need to ensure children grow up with a love and understanding of the countryside, before they become a generation of uncomprehending adults.  Margaret Atwood then reminded us of the interconnectedness of nature and human wellbeing; our dependence on the health of the oceans; and the fact that birds, in travelling the globe, give us “an overview of the entire web of life.”  Atwood, Gibson and Cocker are among 28 literary figures to have written to Oxford University Press in support of the #naturewords campaign.

They, along with Festival Director Dr. Al Cormack formed a panel to take questions.  The first, from Jessica Lawrence, asked simply “which one word would you put back in the Junior Dictionary if you could?”

Atwood and Cocker both saw acorn as having the strongest symbolism – the seed of mighty oak trees, with their great cultural significance; Cormack felt it was unimaginable to omit Britain’s most popular flower, the bluebell.  Graeme Gibson, however, declared himself unwilling even to consider the question; for him, it wasn’t about trading odd words, but (he explained to me afterwards) about safeguarding nature literacy.

Meanwhile, Saturday’s Guardian Review devoted two and a half pages to Robert Macfarlane’s magpie-like gathering of those dialect words that enable a forensic specificity in describing nature.  His article bemoans the impoverishment of nature vocabulary symptomised by the OJD word-cull.  In today’s Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard interviews Macfarlane ahead of his forthcoming book Landmarks.  Appleyard cites the “disastrously edited” Junior Dictionary as an example of “virtuality replacing real contact with real things.”  Macfarlane tells him that some children are making and remaking our sense of place:  “I want to send people out into the landscape and down into the dictionary.”