A return to normal , pre-incubation behavior for our female osprey today, who has spent plenty of time on the nest but shown no signs so far of egg laying again. Her mate has brought in two fish today, one just after noon and another which he caught at around 4pm. The male osprey took this huge Perch to a nearby tree and tried to eat it, but it was in fact still alive and it did not concede lightly! It struggled, flapped and gave a good fight, which the osprey had quite some trouble subduing, before it was finally succumbed. The male then ate its head and then brought it back to the nest to share with his mate around 4.25pm. As I write, she has only just finished the (very red) tail of this enormous fish.

On other wildlife news on the reserve,  we have been getting some more wonderful insights into the nocturnal wildlife with our handy camera trap. We have two mink rafts on the reserve, to monitor the presence of these problematic introduced predators, by collecting footprint tracks in soft clay rafts. We decided to set up the camera trap on one of these to see what might be visiting. Not only did we get great footage of brown hares and roe deer, as well as mallards, we also got these two exciting clips:

The first shows what we think is our resident dog Otter investigating the raft, which smelt of old fish we used to bait it previously- he visited twice that night.

http://youtu.be/7tloubpCv04

The second shows a cheeky Pine Marten dropping by- a great sighting which confirms their presence in another area of the reserve.

http://youtu.be/8cOCIbDjJGg