Nesting birds – Grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea)

Описание: ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🔽 License this footage here:
https://1url.cz/bugUa
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

With today's video, I'm checking off another item from the reprehensible list of filmed animals that have been eagerly awaiting their own video for several years. I managed to document these grey wagtails back in June 2019, so they've waited a good four years for processing. But you know - to view, sort, edit, re-edit several times, add sound, adjust color, export, upload, write a description... Such a video swallows a couple of working days. Where is one supposed to find the time for that, right?

But let's stop babbling; I would like to talk a little bit about the lovely protagonists of this video. The grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) is a fairly common inhabitant of the streams and smaller rivers in whose close proximity it is most often found. It runs around on rocks in the water, hunts all sorts of insects, and from the branches of the surrounding trees, it makes a shrill call to drown out the gurgling current. It usually flies away to warmer regions for the winter, but more and more often I meet hardy birds that heroically survive the cold season here in the Czech Republic.

Romantic wildlife filmmakers (like me) don't have it easy with the grey wagtails. These birds have learned to take advantage of human structures for nesting, just like Eurasian wrens or white-throated dippers, and their nests are most often found under bridges, on the beams of forest cabins, in the cracks of house walls, or in nesting boxes. So how do you do it when you want to film wagtails nesting in their original picturesque conditions - on a rock?

Perhaps someone has already devised a more sophisticated method, but my private recipe is as follows. You pick a nice rock at a stream and quietly exclaim: "Ha, this is where a wren, a dipper, or a wagtail must build a nest someday!" And then you wait. A year. Two. Five. Yeah, I used to check this rock continuously for five years before the wagtails actually nested on it. I didn't get there until the last minute, two days before the chicks fledged, but history doesn't ask about that.

To be honest, most of my shots are taken in a similar way. I'm not much of a traveler. I spend a significant part of the spring season driving around the same locations over and over again because I have an idea in my head what interesting things might happen there... And then every once in a while, it works out. You almost always catch the most exciting moments in the places that you know well.

I invite you to enjoy the view of the diligently feeding parents. Let me know if you enjoyed the footage as much as I did. If so, feel free to rejoice - my archive is still overflowing with similar unprocessed shots, so we have a lot to look forward to :-)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

▷ Species
Grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea)

▷ Location and date
Brno district, Czechia | June 2019

▷ Equipment
Panasonic GH5S
Metabones T Smart
Sigma 150-600 C
Sigma 18-35
Rode Videomic Pro

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

▶ YouTube
   / lukaspichvideo  

▶ Facebook
  / lukaspichvideo  

▶ Instagram
  / pichlukas  

▶ Stock footage
https://www.pond5.com/artist/lukaspich
https://www.pond5.com/artist/lukaspich_2

▶ Donations
https://paypal.me/lukaspichvideo

▶ E-mail
[email protected]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Grey wagtail | Motacilla cinerea | Konipas horský | Gebirgsstelze Bergsstelze | Bergeronnette des ruisseaux | lavandera cascadeña | ballerina gialla | Го́рная трясогу́зка

#europeanwildlife #greywagtail #motacillacinerea