Radio Times: Review by:; Jane Anderson

Astonishingly, there are fewer of our native Dartmoor ponies alive in the world than that most famous endangered species, the giant panda.

Their grazing land has shrunk severely and they’ve fallen out of fashion as a “popular” beast. Little girls want glistening stallions these days — apparently, the “David Beckham” of pets — rather than a half-pint horse. But, ironically, it’s because the British are repulsed by the idea of eating horsemeat that so little investment has gone into the breeding of the Dartmoor and other endangered species of wild ponies. There’s a big and currently underexploited market in Europe for our tasty equine friends.

This was just one of the stories in poet Ruth Padel’s second series on British wildlife that challenged everything I thought I knew about native species. She starts with ponies and then introduces us to facts, folklore and literary morsels about owls, salmon, squirrels and snakes.

Padel’s programme on owls, of which we have five native species, including the beautiful barn owl (below), has a particularly personal note. Her first childhood memory is of being held up to an attic window in her London home to watch an owl roosting in the chimney opposite. He would fly off every evening to hunt in Regent’s Park.

Given her day job, Ruth makes a most eloquent wildlife presenter. Her words are mellifluous and we get descriptions of “bitter orange” owl eyes and the “twisting silver flame that seemed to run up the air” that turned out to be a salmon. Wildlife with poetry: what’s not to like?

About this programme

In a second series of Essays on five native wild animals, poet and writer Ruth Padel investigates how people's reactions to wild ponies have been subconsciously shaped by centuries of folklore, literature and biology. Ruth explores how different breeds have lived and been used in Britain and describes how they have been evoked in poetry by John Betjeman and UA Fanthorpe, as well as in artwork by the Ashington group of pit painters.