Pondguru vs Nature #5

Hello there, welcome back. A couple of episodes ago, I was trying to get a bird of prey on camera. I'm gonna try again. There's a nice branch above me just there, coming off one of the big branches from an oak tree. Now below that branch is a bit of a mess, to be honest with you. I've been clearing it out with a chainsaw, so I've left all the vegetation from what I've been cutting back, and it's hazel, holly, and hawthorn off the edge of my wood. So that branch is right near the edge of the wood and it borders a field. It's the back end of the year now so what I'm thinking is hopefully the mice and voles that were living in that field, as the vegetation has been dying down, they might have moved into all of this vegetation in my wood. That up there would probably make a good ambush point for a tawny owl to sit up there and drop down. See all the vegetation there behind me. It's not as messy as I first made out. It is actually quite neat considering how much is there but it's well chopped up and that makes a cracking environment for mice and voles. So I'm going to go up this tree, set up my new camera which is a Bushnell 14 megapixel no glow camera and we'll see what we get. There's better perches than that, there has to be. There's a little bit too much foliage on that one. I want the one that's already bare because that'll kind of indicate that there has been things landing on it. Let's look for another one. This one looks much more likely. Up here there's actually quite a dirty mark and a little bit of muck which looks like it's pigeons muck unfortunately but something has definitely been sitting here. This is an oak tree so the ground's littered with acorns. There's pine trees as well so there's cones all over the place. It's on a bank side so there's going to be a lot of little holes for mice. Hopefully we'll be able to capture on film A tawny owl here. That's the one we're going for now, tawny owl. That's looking good. Right, I'll try and show you the mucky mark on top of this branch here. This is what I hope the camera is looking at. Okay, so we've got our camera there. That is the point that it's looking at, that bare piece of branch there. And below it, We've got a very leafy bankside. Loads of places for mice and voles to make their home. Now, if we don't get a picture of a tawny owl, I'm sure we'll get pictures of pigeons. Because as I say, the ground underneath that tree is littered with acorns, and the pigeons have been feeding on the acorns. I would obviously much prefer to get a tawny owl. So I think that one will leave for a good week. Yeah, we'll leave that one for a week, come back to it, and see what we get. Tawny owl is the prediction. So this one's been up for a good six days I think. I'm almost sure it'll have pigeons on it but I am hoping for an owl. Right let's see what we've got on it. Now I've just come to take the memory card out of this fella and I realise that I haven't had a memory card in. So for six days and nights it's been sitting up in that damn tree just firing away at nothing. It's going It's going back in the tree and this is the result after another five days and nights. Before I do get it down and examine that footage, one thing I will say that I'm not expecting to get, and I will not get, is fox or badger. Definitely not badger. I've had those in pretty much every video, and I'm sick of them. By setting it up a tree, I'm not going to get a badger. I put the camera up. I was initially excited because it was overlooking a good potential area where mice and voles and so on might live. I explained that in the start of the video, so I was thinking owl, I wasn't thinking about all those other birds, there was actually nine different species in that video, I'll just read them out now, I think in the order that they appeared, so we had a pigeon, blackbird, tawny owl, carrion crow, coal tit, magpie, tree sparrow, you can tell the tree sparrow because it's got a little black spot, they're actually very rare in our country, so that was a good, That was a good result. I just don't notice them in the wood. There was a great tit and also a nuthatch as well. That was the very last one. It almost looked like a dull kingfisher. I do see those around. I hear them as well. They've got a very high-pitched kind of peep, peep, peep, like that. They fly a little bit like a woodpecker, with an undulating motion. So that was another nice one to see. So that was nine different species of birds, and the camera was up there for a week. We did manage to get the target species, which was the tawny owl. Unfortunately there wasn't a sparrowhawk, but that would have just been icing on the cake that. Um... To quote an American phrase, I knocked that one out of the park. That was a real result. That brings me another point. So now it is Nature 3, Pond Guru 3. It's a draw. So far. And if you're wondering how you can have three and three from five versus videos, well, one of them was a draw, so we each got a point. That's how that works out, just in case anybody's questioning that. If anybody's interested in checking out more trail cam videos on a different channel, there's a channel that I'm friends with called English Woodsman. He was previously called OOACamping. And he does a lot of outdoor stuff. He himself has got a trail cam and he's been setting it with different levels of success. So as he's getting into that, hopefully you should see some good footage on there. It's a different sort of trail cam to the one I've got. I can't remember the name of it, but he has done a review for it. Now I will be reviewing the trail cams that I've got. Don't worry about that. And I will review them before Christmas if anybody's wanting to buy one for a Christmas present. They all do work very well, but with the Bushnell ones, you get the option of altering how bright the glow is on a night. I need to mess around with that just to make sure that it works well at different ranges and so on, because I think on the last video, number four, that was particularly successful, the Fox and the Badger really could see the glow, but it was very, very close. I think I had it set to... To illuminate either a medium or a long range. So it was way too bright. And that did freak them out. The one in this video was the No Glow camera. And that owl was sitting right next to it. And I don't think it even looked at the camera. But that is the most expensive one of the three that I've got. So look out for the review videos. Check out Outdoor Woodsman. Thanks very much for watching. See you next time.