Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan returned to the National Trust Crom Estate in Fermanagh for Springwatch 2026 episode 10, and the timing could hardly have been more dramatic. Week three has arrived, only three programmes remain, and the nests the team has monitored for a fortnight are now bursting at the seams. Jackdaw chicks face violent intruders, six swallow siblings take their first wobbly steps onto barn beams, and a pine marten sprints across a bridge in broad daylight.
Meanwhile, Iolo Williams stands several hundred feet above the North Sea at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire, surrounded by one of Britain’s greatest natural spectacles. Up to half a million seabirds wheel around the chalk faces below him, and a remarkable piece of citizen science finally explains why some puffin colonies collapse while others flourish.
Springwatch 2026 episode 10 also delivers genuine surprises. Whooper swans that should be in Iceland raise cygnets in Northern Ireland. Great northern divers gather in eerie nighttime rafts on the Isle of Mull. And the humble limpet, dismissed by generations of rockpoolers, emerges as one of evolution’s most repeated success stories. From quiet garden ponds to towering sea cliffs, the programme proves that British nature still has the power to astonish.
The previous evening’s broadcast ended with a live pine marten dashing across the estate’s bridge, and the camera kept rewarding viewers long after the credits rolled. Just forty minutes later, the animal returned in excellent light, giving the team their clearest view yet. A small spot on its chin, set against an otherwise clean white bib, allows this individual to be identified with confidence. Bib markings work like fingerprints for pine martens, and this one has clearly made the bridge part of its regular beat.
The marten paused mid-crossing for a sniff, unsurprising given how much scent marking it has deposited there. Then it sprinted away into the trees, presumably off to hunt. Chris Packham noted, with characteristic mischief, that a pine marten crossing a bridge is usually on its way to do “a bit of murdering.”
As darkness fell, a badger provided the evening’s comic relief. It trotted over the bridge with real purpose, only to return an hour later at a slow, deflated saunter. Michaela Strachan landed on the perfect word for it: mooching. A belly full of worms will do that to an animal. The bridge cam remains under close watch tonight, because this crossing point has become one of the most reliable wildlife theatres on the entire estate.
Springwatch 2026 episode 10
The Boathouse Jackdaw Chick Survives Attacks, Adoption and a Brutal Eviction
No storyline in Springwatch 2026 episode 10 carries higher stakes than the lone jackdaw chick nesting above the boathouse door. This youngster has endured a torrid fortnight. Long stretches passed without food. Both adults seemed to vanish. Then intruding jackdaws began scoping out the nest, and one launched a shocking attack on the chick itself. The youngster, convinced at first that the visitor was a parent, begged for food before being forced to defend itself against a bird many times its size.
Hope arrived from an unexpected direction. A new jackdaw squeezed in through a gap between the nest and the roof tiles, an entrance no bird had ever used before. Instead of attacking, it behaved with complete calm. It tolerated the chick, then began feeding it, and even drove the intruders away. Jackdaw experts believe the attending adult was the resident male, since males rarely abandon valuable nest sites. The newcomer is most likely a new female who has paired with him and accepted his chick rather than evicting it.
Then yesterday everything unravelled. The chick sat alone at 8.46 when the intruders returned, this time as a pair. Two against one proved an impossibly unfair fight, and in the chaos the chick was thrown from the nest above the door. The camera team found it looking forlorn in the doorway below. Crucially, a parent bird soon arrived and led it away. Jackdaw expert Gil McIver judged the fledging early but survivable, because the chick has enough feathers and strength. If the parents guide it to the safety of tree branches and keep feeding it, this battered little survivor should make it.
Red Squirrels Flourish in Fermanagh While Grey Squirrels Disappear Entirely
After weeks of near misses, the cameras finally caught up with Crom’s red squirrels, and the news from Fermanagh is genuinely uplifting. The county’s broadleaf woodland provides rich food all year round, supporting a stable red squirrel population both here and across Northern Ireland. The team suspects the squirrels have been feeding up in the oaks rather than on the pines where cameras typically find them, which explains the long wait for footage.
The grey squirrel story makes the picture even more remarkable. Greys first appeared in Fermanagh in 1946 and might have been expected to displace the reds, as they have across so much of Britain. Instead, a 2024 survey found no grey squirrels in the county at all. That absence removes the threat of squirrel pox, the virus greys carry that devastates red populations. Pine martens appear to deserve much of the credit, a connection the programme promises to explore fully tomorrow.
The squirrels also completed the team’s Fermanagh wish list. Pine martens, white-tailed eagles, red squirrels, Irish goats, Irish hares and even triungulins have all now been ticked off. Few locations have delivered so comprehensively for the series, and the success underlines why Crom has proved such an inspired base for this run of Springwatch.
Fledging Fever Grips the Crom Nests as Six Swallows Make Their Move
The swallow nest has become the estate’s most crowded address, and Springwatch 2026 episode 10 caught the moment the squeeze finally became too much. On Friday all the chicks were crammed in together, flapping and exercising with nowhere to go. By Sunday they had ventured out onto the barn beams, practising short flights and returning to the nest for security. One bold chick led the way while another clearly preferred the company of its siblings. At one point an adult delivered a fly that tumbled straight out of a chick’s beak, instantly becoming the luckiest fly in Northern Ireland.
All six chicks have now successfully semi-fledged, lining up along the beams to be fed. Within days they will leave the barn entirely. The adults will lead them to a food-rich spot, often a fallen tree, where house martins are gathering too. Feeding continues for at least another week, and swallows from an earlier brood will sometimes help feed the newest fledglings. Those earlier-brood birds, with their greater body mass, stand the best chance of surviving the long migration to Africa.
Elsewhere the nest news stays cautiously positive. The spotted flycatchers, sub-Saharan migrants from a species in steep decline, abandoned their five eggs for three anxious hours before both adults returned. Because incubation has only just begun, the eggs should have survived the chill. The starlings, meanwhile, are thriving. Four chicks hatched and both parents now brood, feed and clean diligently, sheltered from the rain in their crack between the bricks. Add the seven great tit chicks that fledged last week, and Crom’s nurseries are emptying in the best possible way.
Behind the Scenes: 15 Kilometres of Cable Connect the Springwatch 2026 Episode 10 Nest Cameras
Michaela Strachan pulled back the curtain on how those intimate nest views actually reach the screen, and the scale of the operation is staggering. Everything starts in a workshop in the Crom courtyard, where remote camera specialist Joe Charlesworth and his team prepare up to 30 modified nest boxes months before broadcast. Each box looks ordinary from the outside but hides a removable side panel, a camouflaged front camera, a second camera in the roof and fibre optic lighting.
Patience governs the whole process. Some birds accept a fully rigged box immediately. Others need the structure built up gradually, layer by layer of wood, so the change never alarms them. Disturbance is the red line throughout. If a bird shows any sign of stress, the team simply abandons that box and moves on. Nests outside boxes require cameras rigged nearby, always positioned while the birds are away.
The numbers behind the live operation tell their own story. Fifteen kilometres of cable run from the broadcast truck to nests scattered across the estate. The buzzard nest proved the most challenging rig of the year, sitting at the top of a tall tree two and a half kilometres from the truck. Team members climbed to the nest itself to install the equipment. Every privileged view of those buzzard chicks represents an extraordinary amount of unseen effort.
A Mimicking Starling Earns Top Marks for Its Pitch-Perfect Buzzard Call
Joe Charlesworth made a second contribution to the programme when he noticed a starling performing on a courtyard chimney. Its song began conventionally enough, then veered into something else entirely. The bird was mimicking other species, a habit shared by around 30 per cent of British songbirds, and its repertoire proved impressively varied.
The buzzard impression scored a perfect ten from both presenters. Chris Packham admitted he had twice stepped outside the caravan, heard the call and scanned the sky for a raptor before realising the starling had fooled him. The wigeon imitation earned a nine, made more remarkable by the fact that wigeon only visit in winter. This starling was reproducing a sound from memory, months after last hearing it. The jay impression, a notoriously difficult rasping call, also scored nine.
Starlings practise what scientists call open-ended learning, adding new sounds throughout their entire lives rather than fixing a song in youth. Sexual selection almost certainly drives the behaviour. In some species, males with larger mimicry repertoires find mates faster, so every borrowed buzzard scream is really an advertisement. Strachan suggested the series itself should adopt the phrase, since Springwatch viewers never stop learning either.
Iolo Williams Explores Bempton’s Seabird City and Its Dangerous Egg-Harvesting Past
From the clifftop at Bempton, Iolo Williams looked down on thousands of circling birds and one of the great wildlife gatherings anywhere in British nature. At peak season the colony may hold half a million seabirds, including 17,000 pairs of gannets, a population still increasing, and more than 100,000 guillemots. When evening light turns the chalk cliffs golden, the spectacle becomes unforgettable.
These birds now enjoy the protection of an RSPB reserve, but the cliffs hold a darker history. For hundreds of years, dating back to at least the 16th century, local families harvested seabird eggs in a perilous practice known as “climming” or “scoot egging.” Whole families took part. They ate some eggs as a valuable food source, sold others at local markets and sent some all the way to London. Egg collecting has been illegal since 1954, and Williams used RSPB replicas to show what those harvesters once gathered.
The replica eggs revealed the elegance of seabird design. The kittiwake’s pale, creamy egg sits in a substantial nest of mud and seaweed, laid in clutches of up to three. The razorbill produces a pear-shaped, or pyriform, egg and nests in fissures and holes. The guillemot egg fascinated most, with individual markings that let adults recognise their own among hundreds packed onto a single ledge. Its peculiar shape long puzzled scientists. One theory holds that it rolls in a tight circle rather than off the ledge.
Newer thinking emphasises surface area: more egg touches the rock, making it harder to dislodge and easier for the incubating adult to keep warm, speeding embryo development. Carrion crows do steal eggs from inattentive parents, but a few losses a day barely register against 100,000 guillemots.
Citizen Science Cracks the Puffin Mystery in Springwatch 2026 Episode 10
Puffins headline Williams’ second report, and Bempton holds exactly 4,279 breeding pairs of them. These are long-lived animals, routinely reaching 20 or 30 years, with the record held by a Norwegian puffin that survived to 41. They spend winter far offshore before returning to the cliffs around April, which explains why visitors often struggle to spot them. National headlines have reported puffin declines, and several colonies have indeed vanished altogether. Yet others remain stable or are growing, and until recently nobody knew why.
The RSPB found the answer through an inspired appeal to the public. People submitted 1,402 photographs of puffins carrying fish, drawn from 27 colonies, and researchers identified more than 11,000 individual prey items from those images. The pattern that emerged was striking. In declining colonies, adults made frequent feeding trips but carried mainly sand eels, which offer low nutritional value. In stable and increasing colonies, the birds brought back sprats, herring and other oil-rich fish packed with energy. Diet quality, not feeding effort, separates the winners from the losers.
Bempton sits on the right side of that divide, with a stable and possibly increasing population, though counting birds on such sheer cliffs remains difficult. The cameras have followed them gathering grass for their burrows, clambering clumsily up slopes and occasionally falling off them. Underwater, the comedy vanishes. Puffins become miniature torpedoes, diving to 60 metres, wings driving them forward and feet steering, before hauling fish home to chicks gloriously named pufflings.
Whooper Swans Defy Migration and Raise Cygnets in Northern Ireland
Local residents Mark and Douglas Ruddock tipped the team off about something unusual on their patch, and the sighting turned out to be a genuine rarity. At first glance the bird looked like an ordinary swan. The bill told a different story. The extensive yellow colouring identified it as a whooper swan, a species that breeds in Iceland and only winters in Britain and Ireland, arriving in October and leaving in April after a migration of 800 to 1,400 kilometres.
This pair never left. They have spent the last four summers in Northern Ireland, attempted to breed last year, and this year succeeded. Cygnets now swim behind them in the middle of June, a sight that should belong to Iceland. Injured whoopers occasionally stay behind when they cannot manage the spring crossing, but successful breeding here remains genuinely exceptional. Strachan admitted she never expected to see it.
The wider picture adds to the good news. Whooper swan numbers have risen by 27 per cent in recent years, and Northern Ireland now hosts a population of 4,644 birds, these two included. For a species so associated with elegance that it inspired Swan Lake, raising a family on the wrong side of the North Atlantic seems a suitably dramatic flourish.
Great Northern Divers Gather in Mysterious Night Rafts on the Isle of Mull
Wildlife guide Clay Blake took viewers to Loch na Keal, one of Mull’s largest sea lochs, in pursuit of a bird he believes slips under most people’s radar. Visitors come to Mull for golden eagles, white-tailed eagles, otters, hen harriers and minke whales. Blake’s favourite is the great northern diver, and early summer offers a golden window to see it. The birds are moulting out of drab winter grey into spectacular breeding plumage, complete with black hood, dark bill and checkered back, yet they have not yet departed for breeding grounds in Greenland, Iceland and North America.
Underwater, these animals perform astonishing feats. A diver can stay submerged for two minutes on a single breath and resurface 50 or 60 metres from where it vanished. Around Mull they hunt flatfish and crabs, and Blake watched one bird wrestle a whole crab down its throat, pausing for a drink mid-struggle. After feeding sessions of around half an hour, they drift offshore to preen, sometimes waving their huge webbed feet in the air as they roll onto their backs.
The evening brought the report’s most haunting moment. As the sun set, solitary divers began drifting in from every corner of the loch, converging into a single nighttime raft. Why they gather this way remains a mystery, but the behaviour makes them countable. Blake’s final tally reached 86 birds, an extraordinary figure. This corner of Scotland may hold one in five of Europe’s entire overwintering population, and his counts feed into international records tracking how the species fares globally.
Limpets, Whirligigs and Tiger Beetles Prove the Small Things Steal the Show
Packham saved his richest science for the limpet, an animal most people dismiss as a boring cone on a rock. Over the last 500 million years, unrelated gastropods have independently evolved that conical shell on at least 54 separate occasions, one of the most repeated examples of convergent evolution known, exceeding even the evolution of the eye. The shape wins because of where limpets live. In the violent intertidal zone, a cone distributes wave energy efficiently while a broad base anchors the animal to rock.
The anchoring itself overturned a century of assumption. Limpets do not use suction. They produce two distinct bio-adhesives: a weaker foraging glue for roaming, and a powerful resting glue deployed when they slot back into their personal home scar, a depression they fit like a key in a lock. While roaming they graze algae with a radula, a tongue-like organ studded with teeth under a millimetre long that possess the highest tensile strength of any known biological material. How they navigate home defeated every experiment. Scientists removed slime trails with oven cleaner and even reshaped the rock with hammers. The limpets still found their scars, by means nobody yet understands.
Two more miniature marvels completed the theme. A film sequence revealed the whirligig beetle’s double life: divided compound eyes watching above and below the water simultaneously, frenzied whirling that scrambles a hungry moorhen’s aim, and an air bubble trapped under the wing case for emergency dives. At almost a metre per second, whirligigs rank among the fastest aquatic insects on Earth. Then viewer Lee Frost’s photograph introduced the green tiger beetle, a heathland predator covering 120 body lengths per second. Usain Bolt managed five. Scaled to human size, the beetle would hit 480 miles per hour, so fast its eyes cannot process images and it must hunt in short bursts.
Springwatch 2026 episode 10 closed with promises that should keep audiences hooked, from a live nesting pair of honey buzzards to water voles and tree sparrows. Whether the cameras settle on a Fermanagh boathouse or a Yorkshire cliff edge, the series keeps proving the same point. The animals living alongside us, from Sussex gardens to Scottish sea lochs, reward anyone patient enough to watch.
FAQ Springwatch 2026 episode 10
Q: Why was the jackdaw chick thrown out of its nest on Springwatch 2026?
A: A pair of intruding jackdaws attacked the lone chick at the Crom boathouse nest and forced it out during a two-against-one fight over the nest site. The camera team later found the chick sheltering in the doorway below, where a parent bird arrived and led it away. Jackdaw expert Gil McIver said the fledging was early but survivable, because the chick had enough feathers and strength to cope.
Q: Why are there no grey squirrels in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland?
A: Grey squirrels first appeared in Fermanagh in 1946, yet a 2024 survey found none remaining in the county. Pine martens appear to be the main reason for their disappearance. Consequently, there is currently no threat of squirrel pox virus infecting the local red squirrels, which maintain a stable population supported by rich broadleaf woodland across Fermanagh and Northern Ireland.
Q: How many seabirds nest at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire?
A: Bempton Cliffs may hold as many as 500,000 seabirds at peak season. The RSPB reserve supports 17,000 pairs of gannets, an increasing population, plus more than 100,000 guillemots alongside razorbills, kittiwakes and puffins. The chalk cliffs now provide a safe haven, although locals harvested seabird eggs there for hundreds of years before egg collecting became illegal in 1954.
Q: Why are some puffin colonies declining while others are stable?
A: Diet quality separates the two. An RSPB citizen science project analysed 1,402 public photographs of puffins carrying fish from 27 colonies, identifying over 11,000 prey items. In declining colonies, adults made frequent trips but carried mainly sand eels, which have low nutritional value. In stable or increasing colonies, the birds brought back oil-rich sprats and herring with high nutritional value.
Q: Why is a guillemot egg shaped like a pear?
A: The original theory held that the pyriform shape makes the egg roll in a tight circle on a narrow ledge instead of falling off. Newer thinking focuses on the surface area to volume ratio. More of the egg stays in contact with the rock, making it harder to push off the cliff and easier for the incubating adult to keep warm, which speeds embryo development.
Q: Why are whooper swans breeding in Northern Ireland unusual?
A: Whooper swans normally migrate 800 to 1,400 kilometres to breed in Iceland, arriving in Britain in October and leaving in April. One pair has spent the last four summers in Northern Ireland and bred successfully this year, raising cygnets in June. The species is also thriving, with numbers up 27% in recent years and a Northern Ireland population of 4,644 birds.
Q: How do limpets stick to rocks so strongly?
A: Limpets use two types of bio-adhesive, not suction as scientists believed for a century. A weaker foraging glue lets them roam and graze algae, while a powerful resting glue locks them into their home scar, a depression they fit like a key. Their cone shell, which evolved independently at least 54 times over 500 million years, also distributes wave energy efficiently in the intertidal zone.
Q: What is the strongest biological material in the natural world?
A: Limpet teeth hold the record. These structures, found on the radula, a tongue-like feeding organ, measure under a millimetre yet possess the highest tensile strength of any known biological substance. The teeth resist deformation, allowing limpets to scour algae directly off rock surfaces as they feed and transfer it into the stomach.
Q: Why do great northern divers gather in rafts at night?
A: The behaviour remains a mystery, but as the sun sets the divers drift in from all corners of the loch and converge in the middle to spend the night together. On Mull, wildlife guide Clay Blake counted 86 birds in one evening raft on Loch na Keal. The gatherings make accurate surveys possible, and this area of Scotland may hold one in five of Europe’s entire overwintering population.
Q: Why do starlings mimic other birds?
A: Sexual selection drives the mimicry, making males more attractive to females. In some species, birds with larger mimicry repertoires find mates faster. Around 30% of songbirds regularly mimic other species, and starlings practise open-ended learning, adding new calls throughout their lives. One starling at Crom produced convincing imitations of a buzzard, a wigeon and a jay, including winter calls remembered from months earlier.
