TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: People say it does often look like a

tropical island because on a nice sunny day when the winds

calm, the Landing Bay becomes very turquoise and flat and it

looks like you're in Greece rather than in England and

Devon.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: A two-hour ferry ride from the North Devon

coast lies a tiny island often described as Britain's very own

Galápagos. It's home to all sorts of wildlife, including an

unassuming plant that lives nowhere else on Earth.

Today we're crossing the Bristol Channel to Lundy Island to meet

the people who spend their days counting cabbages and to find

out why. I'm Rosie Holdsworth and you're listening to Wild

Tales, a whole world on a cabbage.

JOSEPH PAVITT : As you can see, we are approaching Lundy. It is

essential that all passengers remain where they are, keep it

clear of the gangway until the ship is secure alongside.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Welcome to Lundy, a very different kind of

island escape. If you're looking for white sandy beaches and a

bustling nightlife, you've come to the wrong place. And if

you're hoping to keep up with your social media, well, the

phone signal's a bit patchy too.

But if dramatic scenery and world-class bird watching are

your thing, welcome to paradise. Lundy Island may only be three

miles long and half a mile wide, but don't let its size fool you.

Over the centuries it's been a home for pirates, a landmark for

sailors, and a working granite quarry. Today it's one of the

UK's top wildlife destinations.

Every year, thousands of visitors climb aboard the MS

Oldenburg, binoculars at the ready, hoping to catch a glimpse

of some of the wildlife that calls this tiny island home.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: Most people come to Lundy to see the

puffins.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: That's Tara, the assistant warden, and she's

been living and working on the island for over two years.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: Lundy means puffin island in Old Norse.

We're known for our puffins and that's really what most visitors

come here to see. It's a bit of a walk up the hill and then

across to the west coast and along the island to see the

puffin colonies, but it is worth it.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But it's not just puffins that visitors are

keen to find.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: We also have large numbers of other

seabirds, lots of Guillemots and Razorbills, Fulmars, large gull

species and Kittiwakes all nest on the cliffs around the island,

as well as 25,000 Manx Shearwaters, which are much

harder to see because they only come into the cliffs at night.

We're currently in the Landing Bay which is kind of I guess the

entrance to Lundy because it's where the Oldenburg, our

passenger ferry, comes in. On a low tide it's a very popular

place for seals to haul out on Rat Island which all the

visitors like to see as they come off the boat and in a

couple of months time there'll be lots of seal pups in the

Landing Bay as well.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: With so much spectacular wildlife to spot our

plans for today might seem a little unusual. While everyone

else is scanning the cliffs and sea, Tara is going to show us

something most visitors walk straight past.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: We've got to the end of the flat bit in

the Landing Bay now. We've got to go up this steep bit of hill,

which is quite a walk, but well worth it because on the way

there's lots of wildflowers that grow on the slopes above the

Landing Bay. Lots of kidney vetch, thrift. But on the way up

you also get to see quite a large amount of Lundy Cabbage.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Hold on a second. Did you just say Lundy

Cabbage?

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: Well, when you say Lundy Cabbage, people

are like, oh, can I eat it? Where's the cabbage? Because

they expect a cabbage like you get in the supermarkets. But

this is like a wild form of cabbage. So there's no cabbage

ball that you'd pick and eat. It's just quite a tall, leafy

plant.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It's easy to see why visitors are bemused.

With its distinctive yellow flowers, it looks much more like

oilseed rape than the cabbage in your fridge.

And if you're wondering what it tastes like, don't get any

ideas. The Lundy Cabbage is a protected species so picking it

or eating it is strictly off the menu.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: Someone did once get permission to eat it

and apparently it tastes like very strong Brussels sprouts so

I don't think I'll be rushing over to get any soon.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It certainly doesn't sound very appetising so

just why has this cabbage attracted our attention? To

answer that we need to go back over a century. The first

written record came in 1874. When naturalist John Gosse

recorded this plant growing on the island. Like everyone else,

he assumed it was simply the Isle Of Man cabbage, a species

found much more widely around Britain.

It wasn't until 1936 that botanist Frederick Elliston

Wright took a closer look and realised this wasn't just

another wild cabbage after all. It was an entirely separate

species, found naturally nowhere else on Earth. Today it bears

his name, Coincya wrightii, or more commonly, the Lundy

Cabbage.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: It's very special to the island. It's our

only endemic plant. We do have a couple of other rare and

uncommon plants on the island, but nothing that's actually

endemic other than the Lundy Cabbage. So it's very special,

special to the island.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But why only Lundy? The answer lies in the

island's isolation. Cut off from the mainland for thousands of

years, its wildlife has followed its own evolutionary path. Over

time, that has created species from nowhere else on Earth. It's

one of the first things Tara tells the school groups who come

to explore the island.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: They're always quite excited because

it's an endemic species and you tell them it's the only place in

the world where it's found and you get a big fine if you were

to pick it and they always find that quite exciting.

But I like to play a game with them to try and spot the Lundy

Cabbage because there's lots of yellow flower species that all

grow in the same area so they have to try and guess which

one's the cabbage and which one isn't.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Once you know what you're looking for, you

start seeing Lundy cabbages everywhere. But actually it's a

UK Biodiversity Action Plan, or BAP species which means it's

highly protected.

This is because its entire planetary range is confined to a

narrow strip of cliff on the eastern side of Lundy, only two

kilometres long, which is why every May since 1993 the Lundy

Field Society has carried out an annual cabbage count and this

year it was Tara's turn.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: It was almost exactly a month ago we

did the count.

We stood on the beach and looked up with our binoculars and a

clicker and you just scan the cliffs in small bits and click

with your tally counter and then you look at your number and you

look at your partner's number and you see how many cabbage

plants you've got each and if they're about similar you take

an average between the two and if they're wildly different you

count again.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Not all the Lundy cabbages grow in places

that are easy to reach on foot.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: We did a trip out on the MS Oldenburg to

count the cliff growing cabbage up the north east of the island

and we did a little bit by kayak in the Landing Bay because

there's cabbage below the beach road and it's quite hard to see.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Counting cabbages it turns out is not as

easy as it sounds

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: It's also quite hard to do because looking

through binoculars on a kayak for quite a long time makes you

feel a bit seasick

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And as for the final tally

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: I think this year we estimated there to

be around 5200 cabbage plants last year we got 4,200 cabbage

plants.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The annual cabbage count reveals how the

population is changing from year to year. And while the numbers

have fluctuated over time, there's been a huge conservation

effort to restore its habitat. But one of the biggest

challenges has come from a plant that doesn't belong here, the

rhododendron.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: Lundy used to be home to forests of

rhododendron, all up the east coast of the island, which is

the coast we're on at the moment, covered in these big,

huge rhododendron bushes making tunnels along the paths. But

we've been working very hard over the last 25-30 years to

eradicate the rhododendron.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The rhododendron might look

beautiful when it's in flower, but it's bad news for the Lundy

Cabbage. As it grows, it shades out native plants and releases

natural chemicals into the soil that make it difficult for

anything to grow beneath it.

TARA MCEVOY-WILDING: When I go out to the mainland and see all

the rhododendron, I'm like, oh my gosh, there's so many

rhododendrons here, you just don't see them, and if you do

then it's like a big panic, like quick mark down this location.

Text arranging, make sure it gets dug up quickly. Yeah, I

mean, it's a pretty plant, but it needs to be kept under

control.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Restoring the habitat hasn't just benefited

the cabbage, because hidden within the leaves lives

something just as remarkable.

LAURA LARKIN: I'm Laura Larkin, and I work for a wildlife

charity called Bug Life.

KARIM VAHED: I'm Karim Vahed, and I also work for Bug Life.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Today, Laura and Karim are on Lundy, carrying

out the survey of the Lundy Cabbage flea beetle.

LAURA LARKIN: So, yeah, Lundy Cabbage, an endemic plant, also

have an endemic invertebrate that lives on it. So, yeah, the

Lundy Cabbage flea beetle, shockingly, as the name

suggests, lives on and feeds on the Lundy Cabbage.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It's known as a co-endemic relationship, and

it's incredibly rare. In fact... Lundy is the only place in

Britain where this relationship happens.

LAURA LARKIN: We're here trying to figure out where the beetles

are and to kind of see how many patches of cabbage we can find

them on. The beetles themselves are about three and a half

millimetres long. They're kind of like a... Like a kind of

faint metallic-y, kind of bronzy colour.

And they've got these very thick, kind of muscly-looking

back legs. And they use them to jump, which is where the flea

beetle name comes from. So yeah, they can jump, compared to the

size of their body, a very, very, very long distance.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But how exactly do you count a beetle

that's only a few millimetres long?

LAURA LARKIN: We've had to kind of adapt a special bit of kit

for coming here to help us survey in some places. So where

we're stood at the moment, we're on the track on Lundy that runs

from where the ferry comes in at the jetty up towards the main

light settlement at the top of the hill and kind of above us is

this quite kind of sheer cliff. But just up there you can see a

cabbage plant growing out the side of it so to enable us to

kind of check those what we've done is we've got a three meter

fishing pole and have kind of clipped one of our sweep nets to

the end of it and that's a relatively effective if not

slightly unusual looking way surveying the plants that are a

lot higher up and obviously not safe to reach.

And what we do with the sweep net is we kind of move it

backwards and forwards through the cabbage plants. We're doing

five sweeps per plant or kind of ten sweeps per kind of square

metre or so if there's multiple plants in a place.

When we've done those sweeps we pick up the net which I have

just done now and I'm just going to stick my head inside of it

which sounds a bit weird but if you If you don't do that, all

the beetles escape. Let's see what we've got. So... I have got

a flea beetle in here I think.

KARIM VAHED: Do you want a pot?

LAURA LARKIN: I'd love a pot if you can find one. Oh I've got

more than one actually there's another one here there's a

couple that's quite good. So that is...

KARIM VAHED: Is it? Looks right doesn't it?

LAURA LARKIN: Yeah, that's a Lundy Cabbage flea beetle. So

yeah, just like that, we've managed to find a flea beetle,

which is excellent.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And once you've found one, where do you

put it?

LAURA LARKIN: I've got some really tiny glass pots that I

put them in when we catch them.

It just helps us to kind of be able to get a hand lens up to

it, just to confirm for certain that it is.

KARIM VAHED: Then we let them go, alive.

LAURA LARKIN: Yes back on the cabbage again. So yes, we're

simply kind of counting them and, yeah, trying to figure out

where they are and how they're doing.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This isn't Laura's first visit to Lundy.

She carried out the survey last year too, but the conditions

made it a very different experience.

LAURA LARKIN: It was one of those kind of freak July

semi-hurricanes that you occasionally get. And myself and

my colleague Laura ended up getting helicoptered over here,

which was quite exciting, but not ideal for kind of beetle

surveying.

So it was a bit wet, a bit rainy, but we managed to find

some time to go out. And I think that in the kind of two and a

half, three days that we were here, we only managed to find, I

think it was either seven or nine flea beetles over the whole

of the three days.

We've been here so far today probably only about an hour

searching and I think we've already found seven so it's

looking like a really good year which is really exciting. I'm

looking forward to seeing what else we can find across the next

few days as well.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Laura and Karim are working with Tara and

the island team as part of a species recovery programme

supported by Natural England and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species

Conservation Fund.

LAURA LARKIN: What we're hoping to do through the survey is to

kind of map the kind of scrubbier, kind of more brambly

bits where the cabbage is growing and to work with the

island team to kind of clear some of those back to bare

ground.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And this should make more room for the

cabbage to grow.

LAURA LARKIN: The cabbage is kind of a pioneer plant, which

means that it grows best under bare ground conditions. So on

the island at the moment, where you can see them growing, you

notice that they're quite often next to rocks or next to the

path, where the vegetation isn't quite as thick.

They tend to kind of germinate there a lot better than they do

in other places, which will then hopefully in time, yeah, lead to

more cabbage and more beetles.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This year's survey recorded 17 beetles,

which might not sound many, but for a species found nowhere else

on Earth, every individual counts.

LAURA LARKIN: The Lundy Cabbage flea beetle is globally

critically endangered. So it's, yeah, a very, very important

thing to look after.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The Lundy Cabbage and the Lundy Flea

Beetle may not have the star appeal of a puffin, or even the

charisma of a grey seal, but perhaps Lundy's greatest

wildlife story is the one that most people walk straight past.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Wild Tales. If you've

enjoyed it, why not give us a follow or a review? And if you'd

like to find out more about the Lundy Cabbage and the Lundy Flea

Beetle, then head to the episode show notes. I'm Rosie

Holdsworth. See you next time.