Osprey tracking

Welcome to the Scottish Wildlife Trust's osprey tracking project. In September 2012, we started tracking two osprey chicks as they make the long journey from Scotland to West Africa - over 3,000 miles in total. 'Blue 44' hatched at Loch of the Lowes in Perthshire on Monday 21 May 2012; 'Blue YD' at one of the Trust's reserves in Angus in the first week of June.

You can track our osprey chick as it migrates using the map and tabs below, or follow the instructions to view the migration in Google Earth. Regular updates are also available on our blog.

We need your help!

The Trust is currently raising money to track the migration path of a chick from this season's Loch of the Lowes brood. Click here to donate towards the project.

You can turn individual migration tracks on and off using the checkboxes below. Please note that since Dec 2012 we have not been receiving data on Blue 44.

You can change the migration season to view:

Reset map Full screen

Blue YD

Blue YD (c) Keith Brockie

First seen on Tuesday 12 June 2012, this male osprey hatched at one of the Scottish Wildlife Trust's Angus reserves. To protect the nest's location, we have located the first point on the osprey chick's journey over the county town of Forfar. 'Blue YD' was satellite tagged on Tuesday 17 July 2012 by osprey expert Roy Dennis. By tracking his journey to West Africa, we hope to gain valuable information on the behaviour of ospreys.

View in Google Earth

If you would like to follow the migration of the satellite-tracked ospreys within Google Earth, you can add the osprey satellite data to your copy of Google Earth. If you do not already have this software, download it for free from the Google Earth website.

Adding the osprey data to Google Earth

Launch the Google Earth software
Go to the Add menu and click Network Link...
Enter 'Scottish Wildlife Trust osprey tracking' in the Name field
Paste the following address into the Link field:
http://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/osprey_tracking.kml
On the refresh tab, change to Periodically every 24 hours
Click OK to add the Trust's osprey data to the Places list on the left hand side of the screen.
Alternatively, if you click the link above and choose to open it in Google Earth, it will load directly, but not be saved in your list of places.

How to use Google Earth

Once the ospreys are in your list of Places you can use the toolbar on the left hand side to toggle on/off each tracked osprey and double click them to zoom straight to their location.