Afternoon all,

Events from the nest today:

Viewers of the nest today will notice what a good job our pair of ospreys have done so far in building up the sides to create the bowl shape needed to protect the eggs from rolling out. Ospreys are notoriously quite particular about their nests; constantly adjusting bits of material – this is a trait that our female continues to display, as she has done over her previous years breeding here at Loch of the Lowes.

We still all have hope for some eggs to be laid in the near future. With mottled reddish brown markings, these eggs are surprisingly small being the size of an average hen egg!

A question that we received via ospreys@swt.org.uk  queried if there is a way to tell apart our male and female when they are on the nest, as it is increasingly difficult to see our male’s green ring bearing the 7Y mark. My response to this would be to suggest comparing the size of the two birds as male ospreys are generally 20% smaller than females. It is difficult to tell them apart when they are not together, as there is little variation in markings of male and female ospreys.

The markings on our female osprey are also means for identification. These along with her confident behaviour claiming her domain on the nest, are clear indicators as to her identity. We have been able to match these traits with the ‘lightning bolt’ defect marking on her iris, which we now use as a simple means to identify her.

At 9.30am this morning there was another osprey is the vicinity. At this time our male was on his perch but returned to the nest. The presence of our two ospreys was enough on this occasion to deter any intruder without causing any distress.

Both ospreys have been on and off the nest during the day, with our resident male bringing in a fish at 10.48am, which our female then flew off with.            

Other Wildlife at Loch of the Lowes:

Out on the loch today there have been sightings of goldeneye, tufted ducks, mute swans, the ever present mallards, 5 great crested grebes along with about 18 noisy Canada geese this morning.  Over the loch approximately 100 sand martins were again seen ‘feeding up’ for their oncoming breeding season.

On the feeders today we have seen one of our resident woodpeckers, 2 siskins, 2 green finches and numerous small bird including; chaffinches, blue tits, great tits and coal tits.  A yellowhammer was once again spotted on the feeders and in the car park a robin was seen gathering nesting material, the mass of which obscured the familiar red chest on first appearances.

Changes to Webcam viewing:

We’d like to inform you in advance that we will soon be making a slight change to the way we are streaming our web camera footage.  This is simply to avoid the Scottish Wildlife Trust having to pay unnecessarily for bandwidth when people have the camera running on their computer but are not actually viewing it i.e. if you’re looking at other internet sites or have left it on in the background. 

To avoid this, we will be introducing a 15 minute time-out.  If you wish to continue viewing after 15 minutes, all you need to do is press play again.

We want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy viewing our osprey, but as we need to pay for bandwidth associated with this service, we want to make sure our costs are limited to times when people are getting the benefit of watching.

Anna

Perthshire Reserves Seasonal Ranger