Loch Garten osprey diary

One Male, One Female.... who would have predicted that

davidgascoigne — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:28:00 GMT

The eldest of our chick is, we believe, a female, the other, a male.

They have been given leg rings and names. The female has a white leg ring with the letters AY and the male a white leg ring with the letters AZ. They take their names from the two local primary school. AY is called Nethy and AZ is called Deshar.

More later....................

The cameras are being turned off this morning

davidgascoigne — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:30:00 GMT

We are ringing the chicks this morning and will take the opportunity of an empty nest to turn the cameras off and give them a good clean. You will not be missing anything as the ringing takes place on the ground. When the chicks reappear on the nest you will see not only their leg rings but also a little satellite tag on their back... this does not harm them in anyway. If you have questions about satellite tagging please go to http://www.rspb.org.uk/ospreytracking.

Any questions regarding this project which you feel are not answered by this page please send to david.gascoigne@rspb.org.uk ..and put in the subject title "OSPREY TAGGING". Questions posted via the comments page will not be answered.

There will be a catch up blog covering the week's events in a couple of days.

Until then......................

Ringing has not happened yet

davidgascoigne — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:44:00 GMT

You may have read on the webcam page that the ringing was meant to take place last night.... WELL.... it was supposed to but the elements defeated us. Heavy rain around 5.30pm meant that the chicks were too wet to ring and we postponed, the welfare of the chicks is paramount afterall.

We will be ringing when the weather conditions are more favourable.

Many Thanks

Operation Osprey 2008

P.S. We will not be showing the ringing on camera as it takes place on the ground and not on the nest... this is for the safety of both the chicks and the ringer alike.

Also, we do not know when the ringing will take place, we will only know a few hours in advance and even then there could be a last minute cancellation as there was last night.

Everyone has an opinion

davidgascoigne — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:44:00 GMT

I made a decision to publish the opinions of Von and his concerns about the RSPB not saving the chick..... I decided to do this because he is entitled to his opinion and the point he made was put in a sensible and well constructed way.

I may have opened a can of worms by doing this but the blog is not just for self congratulatory comments... we want to know what you think and if you disagree with what we do then say so.

Our policy is to be as non-interventional as we can be, this may seem a little strange when we are going to ring and satellite tag the chicks, it is not. The ringing and tagging of the chicks will give us vital data which will assist our understanding of osprey ecology, this data is invaluable to our further understanding of the birds.
Ringing and tagging does not interfere with the natural processes. There would be no point in doing it if it did since the data obtained would be skewed as a result and therefore useless. Compare that to visiting the nest to take an obvious weak chick and hand rear it... That is interfering with nature.

In broader conservation terms ospreys are doing better now in Scotland, and the rest of Great Britain, than ever before. This can only be because they are producing a good surplus of viable chicks, our smallest chick was not one of those.

I do understand the depth of feeling of many of our readers, and I do not expect you all to agree with our policy. I believe that we gave our smallest chick a fighting chance of survival as a wild bird, when it got to the point where the female rejected it that was too late for us to intervene even if we wanted to. Nature dictates what happens and unfortunately our wee chick died.

I'd like to draw a line under this debate now, let's look forward to the fledging of the two remaining chicks and leave the unfortunate death behind us. We are never going to find common ground on this... So let's agree to disagree and move on.

A windy weekend at Loch Garten

Claire Foot — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:53:00 GMT

It is really rather windy here at Loch Garten today. Those of you with access to the webcam, will have seen that EJ is getting blown about quite a bit up there on the nest. Orange VS, meanwhile, has spent most of the day swapping between his favoured perches around the nest, despite EJ almost constantly food soliciting since 9.45! Yesterday, VS impressed us all by bringing in five fish during the day, despite the strong winds. The wind makes the impressive act of catching a fish, even more difficult, as the surface of the water is broken up, making it even more difficult for the osprey to spot a fish to catch in the first place. However, with VS' performance yesterday, we had high hopes for today, but so far the fish count currently stands at one, brought to the nest at 7.55 this morning!

Meanwhile on the nest, EJ and the chicks are looking well. The chicks have been stretching out their wings, and they were having a good look around yesterday when EJ went for an exercise flight. We did anticipate that EJ would have removed the body of the third chick by now, but as we mention before EJ does not read the text books! We wait to see what she will do over the coming days.

We did have some very happy news on wednesday, when our second Goldeneye duck, who we had been watching with the nest box cameras here at the centre, lead her five ducklings down to Loch Garten, after they had completed the impressive 12ft jump out the nest box. So if you are heading up to Loch Garten in the coming weeks, make sure you look out on the Loch for our various ducklings and their mothers!

As usual, we await the next fish.....

If you want to specifically help the Loch Garten Osprey Team 2008, you might consider supporting the RSPB. You can do this online via the RSPB website: http://www.rspb.org.uk/join, if you add the code PR08 (that is zero eight), your membership will be credited to the Loch Garten team.