Random Wildlife Footage and Spawning Fish

Hello there, welcome back. This video is basically just a collection of clips that I've been making over the last couple of weeks. When I've been going out, I've just been filming little clips of things, or if I've seen something interesting, I've ran back in the house to get the video camera. Unfortunately, one of the things where I really needed a video camera to get in close and stable on the shot, I only had my phone. So that was a little bit of a letdown because that was something quite special, but you'll see that later on. First of all, I want to show you what's been nesting in one of the nest boxes that I put up about two months ago. Thank you. Now, they're pied flycatchers, and believe it or not, they're very difficult to film. Every time I came out with the camcorder, they would just disappear. And when I walked around the pond without the camcorder, they were just sitting in the tree above me. It was very frustrating. I did manage to get one half-decent, if a little bit blurry, photo. On a game cam, unfortunately the game cam was a little bit too close to the flycatcher, so this was the best of the bunch, and that's not very good, I debated whether to put that one in or not, but hopefully from that you can see that they're a very attractive little bird, now we did have either four or five squirrels trying to get at those flycatchers. I managed to shoot four of the five squirrels, and then the flycatchers left the box, so they're away. The one squirrel, I haven't seen that for probably a week or so, so Sparrowhawk might have picked that one up with any luck. Oh, and by the way, that was grey squirrels, not red squirrels. Grey ones basically are just tree rats that destroy so many birds' nests, it's unbelievable. This is the time of year when fish spawn in my pond. And I managed to get a little bit of footage of that. Again, these are Rudd and Roach. Now they were going nuts in that oxygenating weed. And although there was two different species there, they do hybridise. So I've got quite a lot of Rud-Roach hybrids in the pond. I'm talking of eggs in the pond. Hopefully you can see this, but there's actually millions of tiny little fry. So this next clip should show them, you might have to bring it into full screen to see them because they're absolutely minuscule, but these are what hatched out of the Rudd and Roach eggs. Now in England, bees of pretty much every type are dying out, the numbers are going down and down and down, so it was very good that two of the nest boxes that I put up have been populated by bumblebees, so check this out. They're absolutely jam-packed in there now. I don't think the nest can get any bigger. Now, over the last few years, I've been putting a lot of plants into the garden that are good for bees. Things like the iris, foxgloves, and also Himalayan balsam. Now, don't crucify me for that. They are an invasive species, but they're excellent for bees. That's why they're there. They get out of hand and take them out. They're pretty easy to control. Now, this is the bit that I filmed with my phone, unfortunately. Unfortunately I was out on a bike ride. And I saw a deer with a fawn, I didn't have a proper video camera, so I rested the phone on the wall, and I tried to zoom in as much as possible, the zoom isn't very good, but hopefully you'll enjoy this next clip. And it was probably no more than half a mile from my home. Okay, the trout in the pond are getting big, very big. We've been really just cruising around as lords of the pond recently, so I've got a little bit of footage of one or two of them, so check this out. These are just monsters. And they are rainbow trout. There was one brown trout went in there, but I've never seen that since it's went in, so I assume that that one is just staying out of the way and will have more than likely become predatory. If I go out late in the night, and all of those roach and rud fry around the edges, Quite often, I'll just hear a massive splash as if something's just attacked them and they'll scatter. So it's either a big perch or it's possibly that big brown trout. Now about two weeks ago, there was one of the delivery drivers who comes here regularly, said that they had a couple of terrapins and they wanted to put them in the pond. So I let them go in the pond. Here's them. They look happy as anything. Surely that is better than being in a little aquarium. don't like seeing things like that in aquariums. Now in a total departure to what I've just been talking about and what I've just been showing you, this is something that I think is called pareidolia or pareidolia. It's basically when you see inanimate objects and you put some sort of character into them, you basically mistake them for something else. So I'll zoom in on this particular thing that we've noticed at the bottom of the field in front of our house and I'll tell you what I think it looks like after I've seen the clip, see if it matches up. I think that looked like a really creepy person made out of wood standing there like that. Didn't look like that when it was a long way away, it doesn't look like that when it's close, but when you're looking at it from a certain distance to me that's what it looks like. I noticed that one night, he told the wife, he told the kids, And they all thought it looked super spooky. Last couple of things, there's been a few nice plants flowering around the pond. And I've also put some lilies in from a big container that I had in the far end of my garden. Lilies look very nice, I hope that they are spread with some nice iris flowering. And there's also some mimulus flowering at the moment as well. All of which are good for the bees, good for insects in general, and it just brightens the place up, looks really nice. And quickly going back to spawning fish. This is the first time that I've ever seen this particular species of fish spawning. I put a couple of full bales of barley straw in the pond to try and control the green water and as the straw softened and the bales kind of fluffed out a little bit, I was going past there one day and I noticed that there was gudgeon spawning on the side of one of the bales. Perfect place for them to spawn and if you've never heard of gudgeon before, think of them as kind of a cross between a barbel and a minnow. Basically, just like a miniature barbel, about that long, or a giant minnow, there's loads of those in the pond, but as they stay right on the bottom for pretty much all of their lives, you never see them. Okay, that's a lot. I take this opportunity to apologise again for not making a proper video about one thing in particular, but time recently has just been really, really squeezed. So hopefully you enjoyed this, and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.