Take a trip down Springwatch Street

‘Springwatch Street’ - behind the scenes by Deborah Beck

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Springwatch it was decided to run a new feature ‘Springwatch Street’ to highlight night time urban wildlife that the public may not be aware of. This took place in Sheffield, known as The Outdoor City.

I received a flyer through the letterbox in April 2025 asking for people with wildlife gardens who were interested in being filmed by Springwatch. Our street was chosen as it’s well known for its success rate in supporting swifts. Sheffield Swift Network is a charity that collaborates with local groups to install swift boxes, callers and bricks, which many houses have along our street.

Jack Baddams and Jess McCaffrey came to visit several gardens in our street and I was very excited to have my wildlife garden selected. Jess is a Wildlife Camera Operator and put up multiple trail cams in my garden to start monitoring the wildlife at night time. She made increasingly frequent visits to my garden and explained the complexities of capturing footage of animals. Cameras have to be placed where it’s most likely to capture images of animals, footage reviewed regularly and cameras moved if necessary. So far she has had over
12,000 images to review and selected the best ones to show the producers.

During these weeks I’ve become more interested in monitoring the wildlife in my garden. I had some creatures in my pond that I couldn’t identify and the Springwatch team kindly got my photos analysed by an expert and found that they were dragonfly larvae.

I also have had bats in my garden for several years but didn’t know what type. My friend, Claire Moran lives near ‘Springwatch Street’ and works for the Bat Conservation Trust. She kindly lent me her bat detector and I was able to identify the bats as Pipistrelles.

It has been really hard waiting until just before the show aired to find out what wildlife had been captured on camera in my garden. It was so genuinely so exciting when Jack revealed what the cameras had captured.

I’ve been amazed at the number of people involved in a TV production and the types of specialist knowledge and skills needed to make Springwatch. As well as presenters, there has been a whole team collecting the footage, producers, a photographer taking photos of the swifts, drone experts and outside broadcasting colleagues.

Being on ‘Springwatch Street’ has already had an amazing impact. I am more aware now of the importance of swifts and protecting their habitats. My neighbours have expert knowledge about wildlife gardens and they are going to advise me on how I can do even more to support wildlife in my garden.

Working with the BBC Springwatch team behind the scenes has been an amazing experience and if it runs again I can fully recommend taking part in it.

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