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By Hilary Jeffkins, Joint Series Producer

For the Wild Isles team, a bunch of British wildlife obsessives, selecting the cast members for each show in the series was a challenging task – a bit like trying to choose your favourite child.

But there was one unanimous choice, a bird that everyone agreed must be included: the puffin.

Simon King, cameraman and wildlife consultant, suggested filming ‘kleptoparasitic behaviour’ between puffins and black-headed gulls – in simple terms, gulls stealing fish from puffins as they attempt to bring home food for their young.

He had witnessed this dramatic behaviour on the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland. As puffins fly in from the sea with beaks full of sand eels, the greedy gulls wait to snatch the fish they have worked so hard to catch.

It all happens in a flash, so we wanted to reveal the detail of this struggle using a high-speed camera. Filming was planned for 2020, but after a difficult time with covid it was cancelled. Then in 2021, the team got the green light.

We knew the best time to film the behaviour was June, when the puffins each have a single chick, called a puffling. Hungry chicks mean busy parents, making multiple trips out to sea to bring back large numbers of fish.

Simon noticed that quite often puffins chased by gulls panicked and took refuge in the nearest nest burrow, but it was often another bird’s nest. This meant they had to pop back out to run the gauntlet again, making a second dash for their own home.

The canny gulls knew this and waited by the nest holes to ambush them. On just such an occasion Simon’s camera followed a brave little puffin as it made an epic run, pursued by greedy, grabbing gulls, only to skid down a burrow to safety – thankfully, this time, its own.

With this action sequence captured, a puffin colony seemed the perfect location to film the final scene of the opening programme with Sir David Attenborough.

We had visited David earlier in the year and suggested the idea of filming puffins on Skomer, which was met with much enthusiasm. He had been stationed in that area of Pembrokeshire for his national service and so revisiting the island was an exciting proposition for him.

However, for the production team, there was one potential problem: A set of 87 stone steps from the jetty up to the top of the island. Not an issue for David! He practised climbing the stairs in his own house ahead of the shoot, and with the training complete, summited the Skomer steps like a mountain goat.

The filming afternoon on Skomer was one of perfect weather. Laden with kit the team walked carefully across the island to a special place where the footpath crossed a part of a puffin colony.

Here the birds were used to people and traversed the path oblivious to any pedestrians. The team set up the camera and David took up position in the perfect spot, a small clear patch of ground surrounded by puffin burrows.

The afternoon was hot, and a few puffins ambled around. David sat patiently on the ground and practiced his lines, stretching out occasionally to ease his pins and needles. He was word perfect but after almost two hours, there were still only a very few puffins.

But it was just a matter of patience. As the afternoon turned to evening and the light became more golden, magically the puffins began to arrive. They were coming home with their precious catch - and for many, their journey meant passing right around David.

With perfect timing, as the puffin numbers grew, David delivered a powerful and poignant conclusion to the opening episode of the series.

We all trudged back across the island knowing that we had to carry the kit back down the 87 steps – but this time, having captured the magical moment that we came for, we hardly noticed at all.