I apologise for my lack of blog posts recently… it has been quite a week this week! For anyone who follows my website and follows my tweets on Twitter, you will have seen that I had some special visitors to the WildlifeKate patch this week… a film crew from Springwatch!
Last year, on Autumnwatch Unsprung, my clay cavern footage was shown. A few months ago I was contacted and they asked if they could come and film here. I did wonder if anyone ever says, “No thanks!”, but of course, I was delighted that they would feel my patch had potential for a slot on the show.
As you can imagine, it has been extremely difficult to keep it all quiet. I have been working hard out in the garden… possibly with even more drive and enthusiasm than usual and hoping that there would be plenty of wildlife action. I have been keeping Natasha, one of the Series Directors, up to date with what was happening… who was nesting, what life there was etc and then last week, they made plans to come and visit. The Springwatch schedule is cram-packed, with so much to film and edit before the show goes live at the end of May for two weeks. These guys travel all over the country and having them here made me realise the tremendous work that goes into bringing a show such as that to our screens.
To ensure we captured as much wildlife action as possible, Mark, one of the wildlife cameramen came to my patch ahead of the rest of the team and I showed him around.. giving him some ideas of where he might get the best shots.
It made me realise how in tune with my wildlife I was…. I knew where all the different species would be likely to feed and even which feeder they would probably come to. Mark spent the day at various feeders and nest boxes trying to capture action from all areas. He even stayed until gone 11pm at night, capturing my hedgehogs snuffling about the garden. I can’t wait to see that footage as it will be a different view on my hedgehogs to that that I usually have. I tend to just watch them in the box, rather than out in the garden.
On the following day, the rest of the team arrived; Eugene, the cameraman, Gary, for sound and Natasha, along with Liz, who works on the story development. Natasha and Liz had already planned the shoot, with a ‘storyboard’ almost of what the final piece would be like and we set about trying to capture all the clips they would need to build the story of what I do here! It was great fun and we spent the day dodging torrential rain showers, a hail storm and even thunder and lightning! Luckily, in between all of that, we had some sunshine and the chance for me to show off my garden which is looking very pretty at this time of year.
With a few breaks for the essential cuppa and a slice of home-made chocolate cake, we finally filmed all that the team need and they headed off early evening. I was in a whirl!…. I sat down and thought about the wonderful day had had…..as you know, I love sharing my patch with all my followers… but to share it with a crew from Springwatch… well that really has to be the icing on the cake!!
For some more photos from the day, check out the page on my website HERE
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