Hello osprey fans,
Apologies for the recent hiatus in osprey updates, I have been away in Tiree trying to track down a corncrake and a member of our team was isolating due to that thing we all got. This meant our team were very stretched over the jubilee week and spent most of their time talking to excited visitors in the centre. You will be happy to know that the abandonment of my duties didn't lead to me seeing a corncrake. It's true what they say, you can't have your crake and eat it!
There seems to have been lots of strange goings-on in my absence. We had the arrival of some very lovely goshawk chicks that are coming along nicely. It has been interesting to see that they have been eating some red squirrels. We knew that would happen but we are just keeping our fingers crossed that they won't be bringing in any osprey chicks onto their nest!
Our ospreys look like the heat had got to them last week and in an odd turn of events, they both appeared to be attacking one another. On the 2nd of June after the female chased AX6 off the nest he flew back around and gave himself a good knock on the perch branch.
This led to him falling into the tree where he lay dazed for a minute before he returned a barrage of low flying talon strikes on the female who appeared to defend the nest from him.
This would certainly pique my interest in something that has often confused me. How is it that ospreys are recognising one another? Is there something visual cues that they can identify their partner or is it in the way they behave? Perhaps this behaviour of mistaken identity occurs more in establishing pairs of ospreys?
Aside from the standard self-sabotage from within the Garten nest everything seems to be going smoothly. Our prediction date for the first hatch is tomorrow so we can keep our fingers crossed and see if this first egg is hardy enough to survive adult talons and hatch. If this is successful it will be the first osprey chick we have seen on this nest since Odin disappeared in 2017! It seems like a truly monumental moment for Garten when you consider how much change has taken place between then and now. We have a whole new centre, we are a partner in the large forest restoration project in the UK, we have experienced a global pandemic and we have watched the rise of youth climate change protestors fighting to protect the natural world.
Let us hope that amongst all this change that nature and ospreys stay a constant in our lives!