Iolo's Secret Life of Birds

A bird’s life in Wales must be wonderful. A life made in heaven.

Anything but.

Birds have to work from dawn to dusk to find food and water.

If they don’t, they die.

They have to battle with the elements too.

Survival, especially during winter, is always difficult.

And during the spring, they’re busy raising families.

They also have to put up with us

and find a way of surviving in our artificial landscape.

In this series, I’m going to be finding out what a birds life is really like in Wales.

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

and Ill be probing into their secret lives.

These wood pigeons have nested in the center of Cardiff.

It took the pair a week to build the nest.

The female laid the eggs.

For three weeks, both the male and the female took turns with the incubation.

The chicks hatched four days ago.

All is going well.

And then, disaster strikes.

A female sparrowhawk locates the nest.

The pigeon flees, unable to defend her chicks against such a powerful predator.

The sparrowhawk kills the chicks and eats them.

This is the harsh reality of life.

In this programme, Ill be looking at how birds protect themselves from being killed and eaten

and prevent themselves from starving and freezing to death.

In this woodland on Anglesey, one bird has made a decision

that may greatly reduce the chances of her chicks surviving.

This is really odd.

It's obviously autumn, you’ve got leaves all over the floor,

the trees have all changed color,

but come here and have a look at this.

Just in front of me here, at the base of this stump,

just down there, is a mallard sitting on eggs,

in the middle of October!

Mallards usually nest between late February and July, early August maybe,

so why is a mallard sitting down there now?

We’ve had a month of really mild, warm weather,

and I think that they’re confused, they think it’s spring,

so they’ve thought, "Oh, wow, lets mate, lets lay eggs."

And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

She's just really well hidden at the base of that stump.

With winter approaching, the chances of this mallard raising a family are slim.

Even if her eggs hatch, as the weather gradually turns colder,

survival will be extremely difficult for a young bird.

And that’s why most birds nest in the spring.

Warmer temperatures mean there’s a wealth of food available on land and in the sea.

It's a season when everything comes to life.

And for woodland birds especially,

it coincides with a glut of caterpillars eating the leaves.

And that’s one of the reasons why migrant birds come to Wales in the spring.

To ensure that their chicks have the best chance of survival,

birds like the willow warbler travel north from Africa to a landscape that’s rich in food.

This upland farm is near Bala and a beautiful male redstart is feeding chicks.

It too has come from Africa.

Redstarts naturally nest in tree holes,

but this pair have decided to use a hole in a barn wall instead.

The female is less brightly colored

and shares the feeding responsibilities with the male.

With lots of insect larvae, even here on the uplands during spring,

their chicks have all the food they need to survive.

Most of the small migrant birds that come to Wales for the summer are insect eaters.

And it’s a time of year when insects are plentiful.

These swallows are feeding in the Brecon Beacons.

Because our climate is damp and mild, swarms of small insects emerge

and this is essential for the swallows survival.

And the insects keep flying, even on a bad summers day.

Birds are amazing things.

It's a really cold, miserable, wet, Welsh day

and yet, you’ve got half a dozen swallows, feeding above the water.

Even in weather like this, they have to feed

because they’ve got chicks back at the nest.

Usually you see them feeding high up above the trees

or up in the sky because on a warm day, that’s where the insects are.

But now, it’s cold and wet and the insects have been pushed down low,

so they’re feeding above the surface of the water and along the banks.

They go along with their beaks open, like a hoover,

they’re going to hoover up the insects

and they’ll get dozens, sometimes even hundreds at a time,

then they’ll go back and feed the chicks.

These water pools are in Cwm Darran, near Merthyr Tydfil.

Higher up on the heathland above the valley, meadow pipits are nesting.

This pair have succeeded in raising good, healthy chicks.

Other pipits may not fare as well.

There’s a cuckoo about

and that could have a big effect on a pipit chicks survival.

This female is patrolling the heath, on the lookout for a place to lay an egg.

And this is what the cuckoos been looking for.

It's hidden out of the way, beneath the bracken.

The cuckoo has been perching on the pylons, down there,

where she's got a good all round view of this area.

She's waiting for the pipit to leave its nest, shell then dash in,

lay an egg in there and the cuckoos that target meadow pipits

make their eggs look like meadow pipit eggs.

That egg will then hatch, the chick will throw out all the other eggs,

so that the adult meadow pipit will just feed that one chick.

Meadow pipits will do all they can to make it difficult for the cuckoo.

Once it’s detected, it will be mobbed ceaselessly.

Not so much that it’s a cuckoo but because it generally looks like a bird of prey

that could kill its chicks.

The pipit will also try and conceal its approach to the nest,

but inevitably, the cuckoo will succeed.

It’ll manage to lay an egg in a nest.

Her egg on the left is only slightly different.

While the others have a dark patch on one end,

the cuckoo egg doesn’t.

Less than two weeks later, a very bold cuckoo chick hatches.

It has special claws at the tip of its immature wings

to enable it to grab the side of the nest to eject the other eggs.

This, it’ll do eventually and the parental urge will be so strong

that the meadow pipit parents will continue to feed the cuckoo chick,

even though it’ll be the only chick left and look different to their own

It's cruel for the meadow pipit, but essential for the cuckoo.

Hiding the nest from predators is a crucial part of survival.

Birds have different ways of doing this.

Hidden in bushes,

inside trees,

on inaccessible cliffs,

underground,

in and around buildings.

While curlew are often seen on estuaries in the winter,

they nest inland on the ground.

And one curlew has chosen a field near Newtown.

It's a typical place for a curlew nest, but not really a typical nest

because usually, they lay three or four eggs.

There’s only one here. Whats happened? I don’t know.

It's difficult to tell. It may well be that a stoat or a fox has had the other eggs,

or it may well be that she nested elsewhere, failed, and she's had time to lay just one more egg.

It's a typical situation because they love these grass fields.

It's a big bird, so they need tall cover, shell be tucked down here

on the eggs and even when she has to fly off, it’s well camouflaged.

And bear in mind, usually, the grass is over like that,

so from the air, you’re going to see absolutely nothing.

Id better leave her, I think.

It's tough being a curlew in Wales.

There are few nesting pairs

as there are not enough suitable habitats for them.

Much of the Welsh landscape is bare ground

and predators, like crows and buzzards, soon find the eggs and chicks.

Some birds don’t have a nest to hide. They simply hide themselves with excellent camouflage.

This chick has been left by its parents on bare ground above Resolven, in the Neath Valley.

If you’re a bird that’s decided to nest on the floor,

then you’ve got to be really well camouflaged and your chicks have got to be really well camouflaged too.

There’s not a single bird in Britain that does that better than the nightjar.

Just a few centimeters in front of me is a nightjar chick.

It's nearly 9:00pm and the parents have gone off to hunt

and they’ve left their chick behind, on the floor like this,

completely confident that it’s so well camouflaged

it will never be found by any passing fox or badger,

or any predator at all.

And to find a chick like that in an area like this

is almost impossible.

Not daring to give itself away, the chick is always very still,

even at night, but when the parents return from hunting,

remaining hidden takes second place to getting dinner.

The chick is being fed insects, probably moths.

This is Traeth Lafan in the Menai Straits, on the north Wales coast.

It's one of the best locations in Wales to see wading birds.

While feeding in such an open, exposed location,

birds need to protect themselves from being killed by predators.

And the most effective method of doing this on an open estuary

is by keeping together in a flock.

This is even more important at high tide,

when the feeding stops and the birds gather together to rest.

There must be over 1,000 oyster catchers,