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!

Ospreys Are A Go!

In the last week all of our ospreys have made their first flights off the nest. The first (read earlier blog post) on the 17th July followed by the other 2 at some point over the last week. We nearly didn't know about this as we believe that as one of the ospreys chicks made its first leap it landed on top of the camera causing the camera to tilt meaning it was recording the ground. A mission rescue had to be launched on Friday 23rd July to allow us to see pictures of the nest again. All 3 chicks have been seen back on the nest feeding
We never thought that we would see this moment, with the live nest failing early on in the season. But we have battled through and the season has been very successfull!

Osprey Chicks are ringed!

Earlier this week our 3 osprey chicks were ringed. The have been ringed Dark Blue HV, HW and HY. After weighing the chicks and seeing them at close hand we believe that we have 2 males and a female. The closing date for the naming competition is today (9th July) so by early next week our chicks should all have names.

All of the 3 chicks are growing rapidly mainly due to the amount of fish that our male osprey is bringing in! They are not long now off making there first flight. They are now old enough to be able to feed themselves as was seen this morning when one of our chicks was seen trying to swallow a fish tail whole!!

Another osprey chick sees daylight!

Today the second osprey egg has been spotted on the nest. This means that because of the delay of recording the osprey nest the 2nd egg hatched on the 26th May at around 1pm. This is because the latest nest does not have a live linkto the David Marshall Lodge. Also we can only record up to 4 hours of footage at a time and because of this it does take us sometime to discover new happenings on the nest. Please bear with us.

The male osprey is living up to his job of bringing in fish with a plentiful supply of fish for both mother and children arrving at the nest throughout the day. On the other cameras in the Wildlife Viewing room we now have 3 very cute fluffy buzzard chicks, 2 fluff balls that are Barn Owl chicks and a plentiful supply of Great Tit chicks of which some are getting ready to fledge the nest.