Peregrine Falcon wildlife photography vlog.mp4

Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. On today's episode I've travelled about an hour and a half outside of Melbourne just down to the Mornington Peninsula on the coast where I know there's a pair of peregrine falcons that have some chicks. You might be able to see the chicks, they're way off down there on one of the cliff ledges. So the idea today is to see if we can get some good footage of potentially the parents flying through the air but also coming in to feed the chicks. Let's set up and see what we can get. So the chicks are way off there in the distance, I reckon we're about maybe 400 metres away from them so there's no risk of me disturbing the chicks. So I've got my teleconverter on, my two times teleconverter as well as obviously the 600mm lens and I've got the camera in APS-C mode so that's how we're getting images of the birds when they're so far away. At the moment I can't see the parents, they were here a second ago, they've taken off, hopefully they've gone hunting and I'll come back with some food for the chicks shortly. So today's video, it's actually a redo of a video I shot last year where I came to the exact same spot at pretty much exactly the same time of year but when I shot that video there was absolutely no audio at all, I'd somehow buggered it up. I tried to salvage it in post but it just didn't work so I had to scrap the whole thing and so hopefully today fingers crossed we get a better his talons, I'll try and work out what it is in a sec but peregrine falcons, they're amazing animals when you think about it, they're sort of the ultimate predator, the world's fastest animal, here for quite a few hours now with absolutely no action at all except for a brief period when the babies were doing a bit of grooming. They're not calling or anything so they must be fairly well fed so there's only so many photos you can get of a falcon sitting on a fence post or a rock before it becomes a bit repetitive. What we might do is I know of another spot where there's some peregrine falcons, might pack it in here, head over to there and see if there's any landscape from where we were previously. So I'm not on the coast anymore, I'm a little bit inland and this is an old quarry site with these steep cliffs that the falcons are nesting on. The chicks are way up there, a couple hundred meters away, looks like they might have just been fed which means there won't be action for a little bit so we'll settle in now and wait for something to happen. So we've got one adult way up high on a dead tree up here who's asleep. It occasionally sort of turns around when it hears a noise and just opens one eye and then there's another adult behind me again on a dead tree up quite high. That one's actually hard to get any footage or anything of because it's very overcast today, it's against a really white background so you can't really see the bird very well. So it looks like they're settled in, we'll see if the chicks get hungry soon if they take off and try and grab something for them. There's quite a lot of ducks in this quarry which to me seems odd to risk life and limb when you've got a pair of the world's best sort of avian specialist predators actually, I didn't see it until it was actually on the nest but you can quite clearly see there's four babies there that it's feeding. I'm not sure if it's a fresh kill because the adults have been, there's been one on a cliff face and then one just in the tree to my left, so it might have been a kill that they'd stashed and just brought over when the chicks started doing a bit of ultimate predators. Unfortunately not a lot of great photo opportunities today, mostly because of where the birds are perching they are often just so far away from me. Nonetheless, still great to see them, great to see that they're doing well obviously with all the breeding that's going on and it's just a fantastic opportunity to be out in nature again. Please remember to like and subscribe, I'll see you back on the channel very soon.