In pictures: Sean Ronayne and Eoghan Daltun at Cork Podcast Festival
Eoghan Daltun and Seán Ronayne prior to their talk Birdsong & Irish Rewilding for the Cork Podcast Festival at St Luke's, Cork. Picture: David Creedon
Irish nature advocates Sean Ronayne and Eoghan Daltun joined forces at St Luke’s on Friday night for a live event as part of Cork Podcast Festival. The sold-out event rounded off a fine week for Ronayne in particular, following the broadcast of his Birdsong documentary on BBC television.
A native of Cobh, Co Cork, the ornithologist outlined how his own interest in birds developed through visits to the local Cuskinny Marsh, an area which provided a refuge from the sensory overload he sometimes experienced elsewhere.
Throughout the podcast event, he played samples from some of his recordings in Ireland and beyond, including a particularly poignant clip of one of the last-known ring ouzels nesting in Ireland, a species that is functionally extinct in this country.
Daltun, meanwhile, told of his move from Dublin to the Beara peninsula where he has been rewilding an area of rare Atlantic rainforest. His suggestions to help address the biodiversity crisis in Ireland included diverting some of the subsidies sheep farmers currently receive into schemes where they’d be paid not to stock these highly-destructive herbivores.
Cork Podcast Festival continues until Sunday, March 30, with events featuring the likes of Doireann Garrihy, Rob Heffernan and Nicola Tallant. See corkpodcastfestival.ie
