It should be virtually impossible to conceive how playing ghetto blasters could have any possible link with saving Ireland's rarest bird - but that is exactly what is happening here near Athlone.
This week BirdWatch Ireland launched a public appeal for the big blasters to help them trap, ring and fit radio transmitters to Ireland's dwindling corncrake population which survive along the River Shannon.
Yesterday, Catherine Casey, BirdWatch Ireland's senior conservation officer, and Anita Donaghy, of University College Cork, demonstrated just how effectively the ghetto blast trap operates.
Carrying the ghetto blasters playing the sound of a tractor and mower, they drove a young bird into a specially laid trap of mesh where it was captured, ringed, fitted with a special radio transmitter and released.
Catherine explained that although 80 per cent of farmers along the river - where nearly one third of the remaining birds breed - are taking part in a scheme to protect and conserve the bird, numbers are not rising.
"In the last five years the project, which involves paying farmers £42 per acre to cut meadows late and from the centre out, has stabilised numbers. Now we want to see if we can increase them," she said.
She explained this would involve catching young birds to see what happens to them after the breeding season, so a plan can be worked out to improve the habitat and help survival.
"Fortunately, Duchas came up with money and UCC and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds came aboard, and if we can catch the birds and fit them with radio transmitters, we can work out which habitat types the birds like best," she said.
However, according to Catherine and Anita, catching the birds proved to be the most difficult task as many people, including the farmers who own and work the land on which the birds live, have never seen one.
Anita decided the best way to trap the birds was to drive them into special net traps using a long line of ghetto players blasting the recorded sounds of tractors and mowers.
"We need a lot of ghetto blasters because we are working in very wide open spaces, and for that reason we are appealing to anyone who has one to contact us. Condition is unimportant as long as the tape deck works and the louder the better," Anita explained.
The ghetto blasters are also needed because the work is hard on the equipment and they work in all weathers and get wet constantly, she said.
Catherine said the traps have been very successful and upwards of a dozen young birds have been caught and fitted with radio transmitters.
"These are specially designed to fall off after a few weeks so the equipment will not prevent the bird migrating back to Africa in the late summer," she said.
She said preliminary corncrake census returns this year showed there are around 50 calling males in the Shannon Callows and the remaining 100 birds are to be found in Counties Mayo and Donegal, with good populations on islands off these counties.
Catherine said the local farmers, who work closely with the team, "believe we are even madder than they thought we were" but most of them support the conservation of such an important species.
Catherine and her team can be contacted at BirdWatch Ireland, Crank House, Banagher, Co Offaly (Tel: 0509-51676) or www.birdwatchireland.ie