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Recent Events

August 3

Friday 15th started with an empty nest! By 11am we had three hungry chicks waiting on the nest. When H/D arrived with a big flounder, BA, the youngest 'chick', grabbed it and started to eat unaided while its siblings looked on hungrily. By Saturday the weather was again cold and windy, and the nest was often empty. However, we saw all our ospreys at some point in the day. Although all three chicks are well able to feed themselves now, on Sunday, there was H/D feeding 08 with flounder, in between feeding herself. At one point in the afternoon, all three youngsters were on the nest together, an increasingly rare sight. Monday was a cold, windy day, and the young ospreys were lying low in the nest trying to escape the wind. But quite a lot of the day the nest was empty. A common sight now is one youngster on the nest, feeding, then a sibling arrives: the first bird immediately 'mantles' over the fish - hunches its shoulders and half spreads its wings to cover the fish - a definite "this is my fish and I'm not sharing" signal! Sometimes the second bird accepts the situation, sometimes it makes a grab for the fish. I suppose it depends how hungry it is. Wednesday sees H/D feeding herself, maybe she is getting ready for her flight back to West Africa in the next couple of weeks?