The Birdwatchers - award-winning nature documentary

There they are. Two of them. Oh my gosh. I've never seen one before and then I see two at once. Like buses. That was very cool. I was wishing it had been a bit lighter so I could have got a photo but it was lovely just to spend time with them. Our lives are so bloody busy all the time. So much pressure to do things instead of just be things. And I think sometimes when you're bird watching you are so in the moment. I remember describing it to a friend and saying it's one of the few activities I've ever done where you're rewarded for stillness and patience which, let's face it, is fantastic for your mental health. I feel like my shoulders lower several inches after I've been bird watching. It's just a really great de-stressor. Puts a smile back on my face. When I go bird watching I just feel so relaxed. I just feel in tune with myself and nature. It's a time for me to just switch off and anything else that I've got going on in my life I can just forget about it for that half an hour, hour that I'm outside. Bird watching for me is like an escape. It's like a time for me to disconnect. It's always been like a part of me since growing up. I've never gone for a walk and after I felt like worse. There's always made me feel better. Yeah, being outside in nature makes me feel really good. The actual sight of another living creature that is just going about its business, doing its thing. This idea that they're just living their life alongside me is brilliant. I've got a lot more respect for wildlife through doing it and you just feel connected. I feel connected to it. I feel like I'm part of it but I'm as alive and entitled to be here as they are and that goes both ways. They've got every entitlement to be here as I have. This isn't like humans being rulers of the roost. We're all just equals in this space. We're a reservoir site so there's 10 different reservoirs. We have a really significant heron breeding population on site here. We also have the kingfisher, so a really popular bird that people like to come here to see. They're such an elusive species. It's not always easy to see them although they're brightly coloured. That for me is really special. This is where I usually see the kingfisher. There's a heron. I'm going to open this. Just be quiet. I can see a heron. Yeah a grey heron. I don't know why they always look so miserable. This one looks super miserable and people are always so shocked to see their nests because although they're huge birds they like to nest on the tops of trees. They're so beautiful. There's no set definition for a birdwatcher. When I first started birdwatching for me it seemed like something that retired people or people of a certain generation had a lot of time on their hands. It's something that they would do like go outside and look at birds. There have been many different barriers for particularly people of colour from getting outside in terms of not feeling welcome or maybe not having good access to green space. I think growing up in Croydon a lot of people believe that birdwatching and nature is for people who live in rural areas or for white people as well. You don't really see a lot of minorities taking up the space or we're just not represented as well because there are loads of us who love nature but we're just not represented. Our wildlife is not really seen or urban wildlife is not seen as like amazing or cool as like other wildlife so I think there is a misconception and misunderstanding there. You don't need to be an expert to be a birdwatcher. You don't need to have fancy binoculars. You don't need to be a zoologist or ornithologist. You can literally just be someone who wants to walk outside and see or hear birds. You don't need to know their names or their latin names. It's literally a birdwatcher who can look and sound like anything as well. I'm you know a girl from Croydon and I birdwatch in Croydon. I come from a low socio-economic class as well and I found a way to birdwatch so anyone could be a birdwatcher. Unlike with many urban like parks that have water you get lots of coots which are these little, they're ducks, well we say ducks but they're actually part of the roll family. They have really weird feet, really ugly feet actually if I'm being honest. Grey heron flying. Don't you think they look like dinosaurs? When they fly like that it just reminds me how like closely related birds are to dinosaurs. That's a dinosaur in the air. I don't care what anyone says. That's crazy look at that and they still look miserable whilst they fly. People are always like, when I tell them that a bird's in London they always say oh but like there's nothing but pigeons there. But in this short walk that we've done we've seen a coot, we've seen cormorants, we've seen swans, we've seen grey herons, we've seen little egrets. We might see a green woodpecker because I've seen loads of those today. Saw a goldcrest earlier as well. There's just so much. Within one walk here I would see 30 plus species easily, like easily, easily. One of the conservation practices that we do at the wetlands is bird wringing. Bird wringing is all about safely catching birds to put metal rings on their legs which have a unique code on them and this is really important for conservation because when we're looking at protecting bird species we need to know their population size and we also need to know their distribution so where they're moving between. I've been birding for a lot of years before I decided to have a crack at wringing. It's just such a privilege to be able to be up close with the birds. That was the thing that I was really really kind of excited about to have that opportunity and yeah four o'clock in the morning I'm thinking why am I doing this but I'd hate to miss it because it's just so fascinating and it is just such a privilege to handle and be up close with these birds that you know like the reed warblers migrated from Africa to here and they're just these tiny little things and it's yeah it's that kind of awe and amazement of what incredible creatures they are that even when you're thinking after a week in work oh god 3am wake up on a Saturday it's worth it. I always want to get up and be here don't want to miss out. The challenges facing nature today are things like urban development obviously we're a small country with a growing population and the need for housing and other infrastructure is really important but that can mean that happens at the cost of of nature. I'm worried sick about the state of the natural world although I've always cared about it it's always been a little bit more abstract to me than it is now I think actually getting out into the woods and into the wild and actually seeing it for myself and hearing from other people who've been doing this longer than I have how many more birds there used to be for example um how much it's diminished I mean I love swifts for example the swifts in Walthamstow were so lucky to have them and I was talking to people who've lived in Walthamstow for decades who said that the skies used to be full of them 30 years ago three decades ago and they've lived here all their lives and they said oh every summer the air was thick with them and now like this summer I was really worried how few there were so it's it's closer to me than it ever was and it really genuinely upsets me as my friends all testify to I can get quite emotional about it. I'm really aware of the declines that lots of species have gone through and you know some it's been incredible declines just in my lifetime and so anything we can do to capture data that can kind of highlight the value of things like this reed bed here now we've seen just way more numbers of reed warblers here than we would have expected and that even birders would know just from like walking around the ringing data's really highlighted that this is like a really important habitat. Having nature protection and restoration at the kind of core of government policies I think is really really important and trying to get that balance between infrastructure and and nature and there's lots of different ways you know nature can be incorporated into infrastructure development so for example here we've got our swift tower with the swiftness boxes kind of developed into them and you can have that bat box as well put them to houses so I think making that the norm that you know these kind of practices that encourage and provide a home for wildlife I think is yeah really really important. We've kind of got very focused on making cities for people we need to make sure that we've got spaces for wildlife as well because we rely on you know nature so much nature underpins so many of the things that we need you could even say from a selfish perspective it's really important to do it because for human beings without biodiversity the planet won't be able to support us anymore. We just need it to survive you know having green spaces and blue spaces are so crucial for just our ability to survive on the day-to-day our food our water everything comes from nature and we really need to make sure we're protecting it and preserving it as much as we can all the different wildlife as well they have as much right to be here on earth as we do and I think from an ethical viewpoint just allowing nature to exist is just really really important. If you've got access to any kind of space within where you live or work that you can have an influence on making that a space that's better designed for biodiversity then that's a great thing to do so if you've got a garden if you can start to think about putting in things like native species that are good for pollinators and insects they're the bottom of the food chain that will help birds that will help bats putting in a nest box or a good quality bee hotel making those kind of interventions something that everybody can do. The thing we need to overcome if we want to see change is connecting people to nature if people don't care about nature there's going to be no way people are going to want to protect it. Urban communities are so important when it comes to conservation and saving the planet just because we're the global majority but we're often so underrepresented but if we're the global majority surely our actions are so important. My aim is connecting urban communities to nature and showing them look this is what we can do it might feel minute but because there's so many of us if we all do a small step it'll make a big impact. Very mainstream and very peaceful climate activists are now starting to feel like this isn't working you know what do we do and some of my friends are very despondent about it as well and I can't let myself give up hope I've sometimes felt that way and even now talking about it I get emotional but I would risk just being useless if I did that and I think the best thing to do is to keep fighting and try and get others to appreciate what it is you love and not give up hope and do all you can to try and spread the word. As if people just give up what's the point you know we might as well just pack up now and say oh well you know let's just make the most of the last few years we've got of wildlife and be done with it. I don't think anyone really wants to do that and even though we're you know faced with terrible odds right now I can't I can't give up for my own sanity if I gave up it would be given into despair and that's wrong you just can't you can't.