Hi folks,

If you were watching you will have seen chick no.1 spread its wings, hover above the nest and then fly free at 9:09am this morning! I will update you all more in a bit when I get everything else here sorted. Anyone else feeling emotional?!
Fiona

Well what a morning! When I got here at 8:40am, I just knew the conditions were right for a first flight, and both chicks were enjoying the fresh breeze, feeling the ‘wind beneath their wings’! I had sat by the video recorder for about 15mins and decided to get some work done and just as I sat down to count the money, the chick vanished from the screen! You’ll notice it took a while to find where it fly off too as mum had flown back onto her perch, just to confuse me! This was probably to be a landing beacon to the chick. It made a few attempts to land on various trees but the wind proved to strong and blew it over the top off them. An initial attempt was made to land on the nest, which it overshot by a long way, and I admit to having a giggle at that. But after another flight round about the loch, it came in for another attempt and made an almost perfect landing! Lady looked like a proud mum watching their child take it’s first steps while chick no.2 cowered in the nest looking slightly petrified! We just have to hope it plucks up the courage to follow suit, and today would be the perfect day to do so.

There was a lot of confusion as to whether one chick had flown last night, but I have had a look back at the footage and they did spend a lot of time on the edge of the nest just out of camera range of cam1. This is our night vision camera which gets switched on when we leave at night. Unfortunately it appears to have been blown to the right which we won’t be able to correct until the winter when we get up the tree to do some maintenance, so apologies for the poor picture your getting at night.

Keep your eyes peeled for flight number 2!
Fiona