From courting and nesting to hatching and fledging, it’s peak wildlife webcam season, says The Wildlife Trusts, which currently shares more than 25 live video streams online as it monitors and protects sites.
The puffins of Skomer Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast — which recently hit a record-breaking population of 43,626 — are particularly popular, garnering 120,000 views (about 19,000 hours of watch time) last year, and tens of thousands enjoy tuning into the lives of barn owls Finn and Trude in Somerset’s Blackdown Hills; they recently welcomed four fluffy owlets to their nest box, as well as a confused pigeon, who swooped in to lay an egg beside them.
Once extinct ospreys can be seen in Rutland, Cumbria and Wales. Over in Herefordshire, Alban and Boudica, peregrines of St Albans Cathedral, have seen three eggs hatch and the fluffy pups at South Walney, Cumbria’s only grey seal population, are unbelievably cute. Even smaller are the pups of Essex Wildlife Trust’s soprano pipistrelle bat roost; adults are about the size of a human thumb so the young are truly tiny.
‘From barn owls and puffins to bats and seal pups, there’s nothing quite like a webcam to lift our spirits, giving an unrivalled window into the worlds of the wildlife we share a home with,’ says Dom Higgins of The Wildlife Trusts. ‘We know the thrills and spills captured by these webcams are enjoyed by many people from around the world.’
See more on the Wildlife Trusts website.
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