BBC: Secret Life of Birds

A bird's life in Wales must seem the most pleasant existence

you could ever wish for.

What could possibly be better than being on a perch,

singing happily all day without a worry in the world?

And, of course, there's that ability to fly.

To go anywhere you feel like, totally free.

A life made in heaven.

Anything but.

Birds have to work from dawn until dusk.

They have to find food and water to live.

If they fail to do so, they die.

They have to battle the elements.

Survival, especially during Winter, is extremely difficult.

During Spring, they're busy raising new families.

Then they not only have to feed themselves,

but also their hungry chicks.

They have to protect the chicks from others who wish to do them harm.

They can be targets themselves.

And, of course, they have to put up with us.

They have to find a way of surviving in our artificial landscape.

In this series, I'm going to be finding out

what a bird's life is really like in Wales.

I'm going to be discovering the vast array of species we have here.

And I'm going to be probing into their secret lives.

The uplands of Traeth Mawr in the Brecon Beacons.

Dawn's breaking on a cold April morning.

The Beacons' highest peak, Pen y Fan, is in the distance.

This first hour is alive with sounds.

The day starts early for birds.

As the sun rises and the mist lifts,

the birds are revealed in all their glory.

In this programme, I'm exploring the secret life of bird calls.

There can't be that many places left in Wales now

where you've got a fairly unspoilt area like this

with an incredible variety of habitats in it.

You've got the tall grassland here, you've got the gorse,

you've got the hills behind me, you've got marshland,

you've got bracken-covered hills over there as well.

And you've got so many birds here.

You can identify all of them from their calls and their songs.

This is a dunnock.

A willow warbler.

And a sedge warbler.

These are all male birds and they're singing to mark their territory.

And in their territory,

they've chosen the highest perch on the tallest bush to sing.

There's this scratchy kind of call here amongst the gorse.

That's a sedge warbler just in from Africa now.

There are skylarks in this grass. There are meadow pipits.

There's a pair of curlew over there.

There's a willow warbler going away now.

There's been a cuckoo calling from that hillside over there.

The best one, I think, of all is in this marshy, wet area here.

It's a bird called a snipe

and it's got a kind of a tick-tock-tick-tock kind of call.

But it also does a display, where it doesn't use its beak,

it actually uses its tail.

It pushes out these two outer tail feathers,

and when it dives down, it does this most incredible noise.

This is the snipe's tick-tack call.

The snipe is calling somewhere on the ground.

It's loud enough to attract a female into its territory.

And then he displays.

The movement of wind through his outer tail feathers

creates a unique noise.

This is Bute Park, Cardiff.

Here too, it's an early start for the birds.

This is a song thrush, one of our finest singers.

It'll always repeat a phrase at least twice.

It's important to sing early

to be the first one to attract the attention of a female.

Also, his sound will travel further in the park

in the relative silence of the dawn

than it will do later on in the day.

A lot of our birds actually start singing in the middle of Winter.

That's a good thing because there are no leaves and you can see them.

One of the earliest and the smallest is the wren.

There's one singing away in here now.

It's one of our smallest birds and yet it has an incredibly loud song.

I think it's all lungs because it doesn't burst into song,

it absolutely explodes.

This one is waggling its wings like this.

He's got a rival somewhere nearby

and he's trying to make himself look just that little bit bigger.

Cracking birds. I like wrens.

Tee-cher-tee-cher-tee-cher. Can you hear that?

That's a great tit. There's one up here,

and there's another one answering from over there.

It's a really common garden and woodland bird

and yet, you look at it close up and it's stunning.

Greens and yellows and blacks and whites.

The song is interesting.

They've found that the males with the longest and most intricate songs

are the most successful at attracting a mate.

So what they do is, they'll steal little bits of other birds' songs

and incorporate it into their own.

But they've always got that tee-cher-tee-cher element in it.

There are lots of them here.

Great spotted woodpeckers too are attracting each other,

but they have a different method.

They drum.

This is a female. Both males and females drum.

The male has a red patch on his neck.

And like all good drummers, they select the best drum.

The one that will make the most noise.

Although birdsongs can be complex and varied within species,

some birds make do with a very simple one.

This little bird is singing above Ceibwr Bay near Cardigan

on the North Pembrokeshire coast.

When we think of birdsong,

we tend to think of really tuneful songs like the melodious songs

of robins and blackbirds or maybe even the skylark.

But not all birds sing like that. This is a whitethroat.

It's a little warbler that's just come all the way back from Africa.

He keeps singing from the song post he's got here.

In this case, it's an old bit of bramble.

His song is what you could call, at best, a scratchy song.

But it obviously works

because he's got a female nesting just over the bank here.

There he goes. He's going off to feed her for a while

before he comes back and sings from exactly the same post.

This lucky whitethroat probably has one of the best patches of territory in Wales.

A Summer residence with outstanding views.

Some birds are not so lucky. Even very special birds.

This is a Dartford warbler. It's one of Wales' rarest birds.

And his residence overlooks Port Talbot.

The Dartford warbler looks quite different

to any other small bird that you'll see in Wales.

The view doesn't matter.

What's more important is that he's found a small patch of perfect habitat,

where he can sing and nest.

But he'll have to sing very loud above the traffic noise

and this is something all urban birds have to get used to.

This is Betws-y-Coed in North Wales.

It's early morning and the A5 is very busy.

In the park, birds are also getting on with their busy lives.

A song thrush singing away up there.

Singing its little heart out from the top of that tree.

It'll do that all through the Spring and into the Summer.

The problem is, it's decided to nest in a town,

so it's got to compete every morning with the traffic.

Research has shown that urban birds may make their songs louder

to compensate for this noise.

The songs can also be very different to the songs

of the same species living in the countryside.

Not all birds sing from a perch.

Some Welsh birds live in habitats

where there are no trees or suitable perches to sing from.

These are the Gronant sand dunes near Prestatyn in North Wales.

Here, skylarks breed during the Spring and Summer.

I don't think many songs can compete with the skylark song.

It's a busy time for them.

It's Spring and the males are setting up territories.