The chicks are growing up quickly and their feathers are really coming through now so you can begin to see their patterns and colours.  The oldest chick is one month old today and has started eating things he shouldn’t be like the bedding and small sticks from the nest.  He was also observed coughing up a pellet of bark, moss and lichens which is a rare sight in ospreys.  Like other birds of prey, ospreys do occasionally bring up food pellets which consist of the indigestible material from their prey, in our ospreys case the bones and scales from fish, but it is very rare to see this happen and the pellets are generally very small.  It is therefore thought that the majority of the fish consumed by ospreys is passed through their gut and excreted.