On Thursday the 30th October, John Morley of Galway Talks heard from a group of fantastic young students abouts something we rarely get the chance to hear, the sounds of the natural world around us.
This was part of the newest episode of “Ours to Protect”, which this week focused on recycling and why caring for our local environment matters. You can listen back to the final episode of Ours to Protect on the Galway Bay FM website or wherever you get your podcasts, under ‘Galway Talks’.
Students from Lackagh National School shared with us what recycling means to them.
“Recycling is when you get things like plastic, paper, and cardboard and you put them in the recycling bin so that they can be used to make something else instead of having to use new materials and wasting things we don’t need to use.”
“Recycling is important so that we’re not wasting a bunch of materials and so that the animals don’t get harmed.”
“It’s when we take something very old and turn it into something brand-new!”.
For this episode we used an ‘AudioMoth’, which is a clever little autonomous recorder, to collect a few minutes of sound each day from a meadow tucked away in Menlo. Through wind, rain or simple stillness, it captured the calls of nesting garden birds, the pads of foxes passing by and the steady buzz of honeybees.
These little clips of sound reveal a side of the natural world which we walk past every day but almost never stop to really experience. Listening back feels like opening a window into a life that plays out in the background, unnoticed.
To help bring those sounds to life to the young people of Galway, we visited Scoil Bhride in Shantalla to play recordings from our ‘Nature Surveillance Project’ and hear the students’ reactions. Their curiosity and excitement were reminders of something simple but important, when we notice what lives all around us, we instinctively want to protect it.
They had plenty to tell our listeners about all the different animals they could identify from the recordings, “Chuala mé an cág, meantán gorm agus go leor eile”.
“Is maith liom an fháinleog- because they fly all the way from Africa, and that’s cool”.
Small choices every day, such as recycling, using public transport, and making sustainable changes at home, add up. Today’s episode of Ours to Protect focused on recycling in particular as correct sorting and reuse prevents waste, reduces emissions and protects both our homes and the habitats of the wildlife we share Galway (and the world) with.
The students of Briarhill National School had some thoughts how recycling helps to protect our planet.
“Recycling could affect our environment, litter could end up in our oceans and pollute the fish and all the sea-life”.
“It helps the earth by putting plastic bottles in the bin instead of it getting outside and ending up in the ocean”.
Ours to Protect explores practical, local actions like these in every episode, helping us all to understand not just the beauty of the world around us, but the role we can play in guarding it.
Ours to Protect is Funded through Coimisiún na Meán Sound & Vision fund.
