Tracking Rothes and Mallachie

S12 did a detour and  had a little pootle round the Alps. Does that count? :)

Rothes rogue point is exactly 11 deg East longitude, someone has keyed an eleven by mistake....anyway I still think she is going to stay put for a while.

Alan: Last week I looked on faune-aquitaine to see how I managed to send them an email last year, but was stumped. I wanted to tell them about Rothes location, but I resisted the temptation to report a 'sighting' by satellite means. That would be too cheeky!

JSB : I have been checking the sightings on Faune - Aquitaine to see if Rothes has been spotted but no joy. She seems to be able to keep a low profile when at the sturgeon farm.

Came across this raptor research study  of 75 tracked birds from 11 species including 11 ospreys, between 1992 and 1998 . In the first paragraph it mentions Ospreys and the Alps but unfortunately nothing further on that. Interesting read nevertheless. Would love to read this article in the Journal of Avian Biology http://www.jstor.org/pss/3677089 which they cite.

Chloe.  I will send you a friend request so that we can talk about the Journal of Avian Biology in a less public place. Emma.

Thanks Emma.

Just back from my trip to Scotland (and LG!) and I'm delighted to hear that Rothes is back at the sturgeon farm - at last one of my predictions about her has been fulfilled!

Somewhere I've seen a question from TeeJay, about whether Richard still has the contact details for Dr Alan Jones - they are in this document which I will copy to the blog for Richard. For those who weren't around at the time of Rothes' previous stay there in Aug/Sep 2009, there's some interesting information here about the firm, and its fishy products.

jsb - Remember that the sturgeon farm is located in Charente-Maritime department and is therefore covered by Faune-Charente-Maritime. Our contacts in 2009 with Faune-Aquitaine arose because of Mallachie being photographed by Didier Domec, not because of Rothes. In addition, Faune-Aquitaine (and possibly the other sites in the series) have an embargo on osprey sightings from 1st May - 31st July. I feel that the first contact "on the ground" ought to be from Richard to Dr Jones - suggest we wait and see what develops.

Some scenes of the Gironde.......

Faune - Anjou, Faune - Auvergne and Faune - Charente - Maritime were stiil reporting sightings during May. I stopped checking when I went on holiday on 14th May.

Alan: I did not know about this, but Sue C is correct. It must be LPO (Ligue de Protection des Oiseaux) policy. This from the f-a site and f-c-m is the same.

Restriction sightings f-a

The link may not work for all as I am logged onto f-a to view it.

Sue C: Sue it was only a slip of the finger I meant f-c-m. on above post.

The kick off in the fish farm interest came from a couple of people on here and I posted this on the community thread on 24th August 2009.

Incidentally this is retreived from my email as the RSPB search after the relaunch of community does not seem to search back that far.

I then had an exchange of emails with Richard about the wisdom of attracting too much publicity to Rothes' roosting location at the farm.

Rothes' recent locations at the sturgeon farm.

I assume that if the LG team were getting points further afield, they would show them, which suggests she is touring the area less than on her first visit in 2009. Perhaps this implies she is more effective at fishing than as a juvenile, and therefore has more time to spend lounging about in the wood overlooking the fish ponds.  However her most recent 2 positions, on the 9th July, were across the estuary in the Medoc, around what looks like a worked out gravel pit.