Pat O’Brien

There were wagtails and dippers.

In the middle of it all, a sparrowhawk swooped through just to kind of show that, you know, we might be having a bit of a day off, but it's a hard life out there.

Well, I live on the river.

Any of my downtime is spent just looking and listening.

The dippers, I watched a mother and two chicks there, not this year, last year, and coming up beside me.

And she was in and out of the river every time she came back with a caddis flag.

And fed it to two chicks who were very demanding.

She never went more than a few feet.

But you can see her under the water and hopping out and feeding the chicks.

It's just life.

There's so much going on.

We're looking today and the trees are finally budding.

It's been kind of a late spring.

A lot of animal life has kind of been...

in waiting.

The pearl mussel, which we talked about at the start, we're not sure if it's successfully breeding here in Uchtdraert.

The last study looked at it and didn't find the cysts on the trout and the salmon, which is the second phase of their life cycle.

They have to be spawned, picked up by the trout on their gills and live there for a while before dropping into the gravel.

None of those were spotted in the last study.

But you have to do it at the right time.