Recorded on the outskirts of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, this episode drops David into the high-stakes reality of animal conservation. Guided by Peter Blinston and his team at Painted Dog Conservation, David joins the people whose work keeps Lycaon pictus alive in the buffer zone:

Belinda Ncube, PDC’s first female ranger, whose story runs from childhood bush camp to leading a unit of women in a landscape still shaped by patriarchal assumptions;

Adraino Sitole, who began as a community volunteer after a Painted dog was killed in a snare just moments from his village, and now tracks poachers with trained sniffer dogs while helping remove thousands of wire traps from the bush;

and David Kuvawoga, PDC's Director of Operations, who literally takes Oakes from patrol to rapid response - explaining how the team uses radio alerts and 24/7 tracking to push packs away from snares, highways and other anthropogenic threats, and why, in this context, the low risk of ‘...a habituated wild dog is better than a dead wild dog.’

Painted Dogs may be Africa’s most effective large hunter, but they cannot outrun snares, disease spillover from domestic animals, a barage of road vehicles, or the human economics that drive bushmeat poaching in the first place. In this episode, David wrestles, in real time, with the moral knot at the heart of modern conservation: when drought, food insecurity and job scarcity push people towards the wild, removing snares is urgent, life-saving triage - yet it’s also only a sticking plaster if the conditions that put the wire in the bush remain unchanged. What emerges is the logic of PDC’s approach: conservation that extends beyond tracking collars and snare patrols into community investment - education, employment, youth programmes, and practical alternatives - because long-term ecological security in Hwange doesn’t begin with the dogs. It begins with the people who share their land.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Around a table at the Woodland Trust's headquarters in Grantham, David sits down with three of the most powerful voices in British conservation: Darren Moorcroft, Chief Executive of the Woodland Trust; Craig Bennett OBE, Chief Executive of The Wildlife Trusts; and Beccy Speight, Chief Executive of the RSPB - between them, custodians of millions of members, thousands of nature reserves, and decades of hard-won environmental progress.

It is, on paper, a story of success. The RSPB alone counts more members than every major UK political party combined. The Woodland Trust manages 1,200 sites, all free and open to anyone. The Wildlife Trusts have more nature reserves than McDonald's has restaurants - and if an ambitious bid for a vast estate in Northumberland succeeds, their newest will be the size of Athens. (Put that in your Veggie Burger, Ronald!) And yet the State of Nature reports - co-authored by all three organisations since 2013 - tell a grimmer story: the UK remains one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. So if these organisations are succeeding, why is there less wildlife in Britain today than when the first report was published?

What follows is a candid, wide-ranging conversation about why that gap persists - and, more importantly, what it will take to close it. The trio are frank about the limits of their power and the outsized influence of ideology on Downing Street, but also clear-eyed about what is changing: public awareness is shifting, businesses are moving beyond philanthropy, and a growing movement is starting to feel "...like a wave that can be pushed further up the beach than ever before."

All three believe that tipping-point is closer than it looks. As Craig puts it: if you got rid of the economy, nature would be fine. If you got rid of nature, there would be no economy. Get that truth to land in the right places - and the next State of Nature report might finally tell a different story.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Following on from two episodes recorded on San Cristóbal Island, this episode finds David having set sail across the Galapagos archipelago for Santa Cruz; destination: the headquarters of the Charles Darwin Foundation — the research institution founded alongside the Galápagos National Park, and still at the heart of how science becomes conservation on the islands.

Joining David is Rakan Zahawi, CDF’s relatively new Chief Executive. Rakan is a botanist and restoration ecologist who arrived after running botanical gardens in Hawaii and Costa Rica, and now helps steer one of the most ambitious ecological recovery efforts anywhere on the planet. At the centre of this conversation is the Floreana Project: a multi-decade initiative to restore the Galapagos island of Floreana to a natural state, one pre-dating humankind’s arrival in the Galapagos. By tackling invasive species at scale and rebuilding ecosystem function from the ground up, Rakan explains why removing cats and rodents is only the start, and how quickly native wildlife can rebound when pressure lifts — from finches and reptiles to the startling reappearance of the Galápagos Rail for the first time since Darwin’s 1835 visit. With that groundwork laid, attention turns to what comes next: a carefully sequenced programme of reintroductions, led by the recent (last week, no less!) return of giant tortoises to Floreana — hybrids, standing in for a lineage wiped out long ago — as a headline step in a restoration story decades in the making. All that, plus the methodical science behind biocontrol, the worries of a parasitic “avian vampire fly” that threatens Galápagos avian life, and what lies ahead for CDF and its present and future partnerships.

This episode was recorded live at the Charles Darwin Science Centre on Isla Santa Cruz in the Galápagos.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.