3:52
No way. A kingfisher has literally just flown past with a fish in its beak, landed in the tree just there, and gone straight into where the trail comes off. We haven't even started filming yet. But we've already seen it. So, we're at Wildlife Aid's 20-acre site. A lot of people know Wildlife Aid as a rescue charity, rescuing and rehabilitating animals. Um but we also have a wilderness site that we've been working on for the last 5 years. So, this site used to be a motocross uh next to the M25. It was not an inviting place for wildlife at all. We've been working really hard putting in these ponds, planting a host of different trees, and screening off the M25 to try and encourage wildlife species uh to start using this site.
We've had so many amazing species using the ponds and the surrounding habitat. And we've had some very exciting discoveries on the River Mole that we're going to show you now. So, this winter we set ourselves a challenge of trying to film kingfishers using our site. Kingfishers are an indicator that this habitat is a thriving area for wildlife. It shows that there's a lack of human disruption um and good water quality as well. Um so, it would really be something fantastic to show that all of our efforts were worth it. The problem with trying to film a kingfisher is that they're incredibly elusive. They don't like human disruption, so trying to film them without them fleeing is very difficult.
We were trying all winter to film them, but we really struggled to get any footage at all. That was until recently when I took our boat down the stretch of the River Mole to look for signs of kingfishers. After hours of searching, I got all the way down to our 20-acre site and I found a burrow. Um and we managed to put up trail cameras on the burrow. So, right now we're going to go down and check the trail cameras to see what we've got and hopefully we'll have some kingfisher action. So, we're going to try and do this quite quickly just so that we don't disturb the kingfishers if they are indeed nesting in there.
What's happening here is this. A ton of kingfisher poo um or guano. This is really exciting. So, we're going to quickly jump back in the boat um so we're not going to disturb them anymore. Got the SD card um and we're going to go and check the footage, but from the looks of this they're definitely using this burrow. I would say there are chicks in there. So, it's a shame that uh cameras can't smell cuz uh it'd be great for you guys to smell this. There's not many birds that have such fishy poo. Definitely um freshwater birds. So, this is telltale sign that's kingfisher. I'm not sure how good the uh the footage is going to be because the kingfishers have kind of attacked my camera there a little bit, but um
we'll see what we've got. Fingers crossed that it'll be good footage. Definitely got a bit of a pong to it. So, um we've just taken the SD out of the camera and we've had quite a lot of water come out with it. So, that's not looking overwhelmingly promising. Um hopefully you can see it dripping on me now. Um hopefully the SD still is functioning and hasn't corrupted. Um and hopefully we've still got some kingfisher but we'll have a look now. And nothing happening. Oh. There we go. Oh, amazing. So, that's one of the parents leaving the burrow. And there is a kingfisher bringing a fish into the burrow. So, that tells us that there are chicks in there. So, these are parents feeding their chicks,
which is everything we hoped for. We saw tons of kingfisher activity, both parents going in and out feeding the chicks. Pair of jays really investigating the nest. They could potentially tear the young chicks and out of the burrow and eat them. We really weren't sure whether we would see the chicks again. Thankfully, the kingfishers returned, and they were still feeding the young. They had survived unscathed. All that effort that we went to over winter, uh trying to find the king kingfishers, the amount of hours we put in trying to film them, um
and it's just awesome to see. It's such a testament to the work all of our volunteers have put in to turn that barren bit of landscape into an absolute haven for wildlife that now supports a brood of kingfishers, which is [snorts] amazing.
