It must be love!

Well our ospreys are certainly experiencing the Scottish weather today with rain and high speed winds to tackle. It shouldn't be to long now before we start to see the first egg hatching, it will be 37 days on the 30th May ( a week today) since the first egg was laid.

I just thought that I would let you know about something that has been happening over the last few weeks on the nest that shows our new osprey pair are defiantly in love....

As with any other osprey pair its the male that is doing the fishing while the female is incubating the eggs on the nest. As we would expect the male is bringing the fish in headless having taken his share leaving the rest for the female. Usually what should happen is the female would fly away to eat the rest of the fish, while the male does a little incubation. But this is where our tale takes a twist!

Our female is flying off to perch on a nearby tree then bringing back some of the fish to give back to the male, kind of saying "Thanks I've had enough now would you like some more?"! How sweet :-)

P.S All 9 blue tit eggs hatched on Thursday and we currently still have 3 barn owl chicks, who are growing rather rapidly!

1st there was one, now there are three!!

Just to let you all know that our unringed female osprey laid her 3rd egg of the season on Thursday (28th).

If was a year ago this weekend that the nest site suffered from an invasion by another osprey (who is actually this years male) which resulted in the egg being kicked out of the nest. Fingers crossed this doesn't happen again.

Both male and female are taking on parental responsibility well, with the male bringing in both fish and taking his turn at incubating the eggs!

Don't forget you can watch all the action from the comfort of your home, thanks to our online webcam!

Robert

Eggs for Easter!

Hi Folks,
Hot off the press (or the TV screen!) our female osprey has just laid her 2nd egg of the season. It was laid at around 15.30 this afternoon (Monday 25th April). This is around 60 hours after the first which is normal for ospreys.

Unusually our male bird has taken quite a fancy to incubating the eggs!! This is considered the females role.

We will keep you posted over the next few days.

Robert

EGG NUMBER ONE!

I can now confirm that our unringed female has laid her first egg! It was spotted at 10.17am this morning (Saturday 23rd April). We believe it was laid at some point over night. Both male and female have been spotted incubating the egg this morning. We will keep you up to date over the next few days to let you know how things are going!

P.S. Also just to let you know our Barn Owl has successfully hatched all her five chicks!

Web cam up and running!

Just to let you all know that you can now watch the happenings of the Aberfoyle ospreys from the comfort of your home. Our online web cam is know up and running meaning up can keep up to date with the ospreys throughout the season. The camera will take a picture of the nest every 2 minutes between the hours of 10am and 5pm. These will automatically upload to the web page.

These images can be viewed at: http://www.forestry.gov.uk/website/forestry.nsf/byunique/infd-72ufv3

We are hoping that our female will be laying eggs soon, she has been showing signs over the last few days, so fingers crossed not long now!

Third time lucky for Aberfoyle Nest?

As many of you are already aware there has been a highly contested battle for the Aberfoyle osprey nest this season. It is only just over 2 weeks since the ospreys returned and we have already had 5 different ospreys on the nest (3 females and 2 males). We currently have a metal ringed male, who was the "trouble maker" last year, who kicked out the eggs at the beginning of May 2010 and a new female who is unusually totally unringed! This new female has been around since Saturday and things are looking promising. There has been lots of nesting material brought in as well as repeated mating taking place. It is a year ago tomorrow (Tuesday) that we had our first egg last year, so we shouldn't have long to wait, fingers crossed!

A new female for Aberfoyle ospreys?

As reported last week, since the return of our "trouble maker" bird from last season, neither yellow OU nor green DX have been spotted on the nest. Instead, the metal-ringed male osprey was seen on his own waiting for the return of last year's female, Red 6A. She still hasn't returned but the male's attention now seems to have been diverted to a new younger model in the shape of a 4 year old female, ringed white HA, who arrived on the nest on Friday. All we know about this new female is that she was hatched in the Tweed Valley, Scottish Borders in 2007. It is not especially unusual for female ospreys to venture slightly further afield from their birthplace in the hunt for a suitable nesting location. Hopefully white HA and metal ring are going to be our resident couple for the season as we have already had 4 different ospreys on the nest in the last 10 days! As many of you know there is also live viewing of Ospreys in the Tweed Valley. You can check out their blog at: http://tweedvalleyospreys.blogspot.com/ P.S One of our barn owl eggs has hatched, only four to go!