As part of Midlands Today’s Springwatch series, I often film a piece with them to correspond with my appearance on the show. This year, Karen, the producer contacted me and asked if I would like to film at Yew View! She had been following my blog and tweets and seen all the great footage we are getting there. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I have filmed with David Gregory-Kumar (The Science correspondent) over the last few years and the other pieces I have done for Midlands Today can be seen below… the first was when I first appeared on Springwatch back in 2012….
… and then this one when we had a very heavy snow fall in January 2013 and we talked about what you can do to help the birds through spells of severe weather!
Then, in 2013 we managed to do a live broadcast from my garden, despite it being in a dip and the satellite van struggling to lock onto the satellite!!
With SO much happening at Yew View and it being such a stunning site, we arranged to film on Wednesday and the forecast was good. Yew View is looking simply stunning at the moment and I was very excited to show the team around!
I feel like I have been part of this wonderful garden for ages, but I only started working there in August 2014… so I am seeing the garden in Spring for the first time. We have achieved a tremendous amount in just 9 months and we have SO much more planned!
The team arrived at about 11am; David Gregory-Kumar (Science Correspondent), Karen Kenworthy (Producer) and Matthew Jinks (Camera man) and David and DJ (who own Yew View) joined us on a walk around the garden, to give them all an idea of where everything was. We had already discussed possibilities and I had sent the team some of our footage. The main challenge was to try to condense everything down to just a a couple of minutes for the piece! We have enough at Yew View for a whole series and could probably run Springwatch from here, we have so much happening! With 27 cameras now, we are actually matching Springwatch this year!
David, who took me on last August, was not keen on appearing on camera himself and was happy to let me do all the pieces to camera, but we managed to convince him… David GK’s relaxed chatting approach makes it easy to be on camera and you soon forget they are filming!
We started at the wildlife pond and I explained to DGK how I had used the Bushnell trail cam to capture our kingfisher hunting from the post…
We strolled through the wild flower meadow and up to the badger sett cameras…
I explained how we have been monitoring the two entrances on our setts and told him about some of the great footage we have been collecting… you will have to watch Midlands Today to see it!!
Strolling around the rest of the garden, we filmed all the other possible pieces for the show and, needless to say, we had LOADS to show and say and much won’t actually make it, sadly due to time limitations…
We had a truly great day and I can’t wait for the piece to go out! It is due to be aired on Monday June 8th, ahead of my appearance on BBC Springwatch Extra on Thursday 11th, where I will be talking about how you can set up your own mini Springwatch in your garden!! Thanks to all the team and to David and DJ for allowing me to show off their garden to Midlands Today viewers in just a few weeks…. don’t forget to tune in!!
