Today’s blog entry lives up to its ‘Wildlife Diary’ title with many of species showing off their young for the first time.

On the Osprey nest it’s been quiet, rather too quiet in terms of fish. After yesterday’s pike/trout smorgasbord our male has rather let himself down with only two fish in so far, a Perch and Brown Trout. He left it 18 hours before he brought in the first fish today which is unusual both in terms of his normal behaviour but also she didn’t shout at him once for food. He came back to the nest a few times empty taloned but didn’t stay for long, our wee chick got very excited every time this happened as it was expecting to be fed. The chick seems to be changing and growing in front of our eyes, I’m sure it’s much darker this evening than it was this morning and it continues to waddle around the nest. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

There was great excitement in the Visitor Centre this afternoon when a female Great Spotted Woodpecker brought her fledgling chicks down to be fed. We watched as two of them jostled for position while the third one, looking rather grumpy, sat off to the side. Their mother carefully mashed up the peanuts and made sure each one got a fair share.

We were also delighted to see one of this year’s Red Squirrel kittens appear and spend most of the afternoon working out how to get into the Squirrel Feeder. At the time of writing it was still trying to get into the bottom of the box rather than lifting the lid at the top! One of our adult Squirrels took using the feeders to a new level by getting into the box and spending a good 10 – 15 minutes in there eating it’s way through the peanuts. Amazingly it was still hungry when it eventually climbed out.

 

 

A Treecreeper was spotted dancing up the tree and a Woodmouse has been getting a taste for the peanuts as after hoovering up all the ones of the ground it graduated to sitting on top of the peanut box.

In our Blue Tit nest boxes, Box 1 the chicks are the same age at the Osprey chick and are doing well. Overnight they’ve gone from pink and naked to fluffy minature blue tits.  We haven’t been able to see much of the newly hatched chicks in Box 2 as she’s been incubating most of the day but there’s been plenty of food coming in from the male.

Our Great Crested Grebe nest out on the lilypads seems to be holding up well, the addition of sticks and twigs this time has helped hold it together. I got a clear view of the egg this morning and the male is continuing to pluck and drag lilypads to add to the nest.

We have a very special event coming up on Monday 18^th June. Our friends over at Rutland Ospreys are doing the Three Peaks Challenge and are stopping here on their way north to do a talk on Osprey Migration and Developing Wildlife Education in West Africa. It’s at 7.30pm here at Loch of the Lowes. We know many of the UK Ospreys winter over in West Africa so it will be interesting to see if we can make some connections.

Finally hello to all the blog followers who’ve visited over the last couple of days, it’s been great to meet everyone and find out who’s out there reading all this!

Lindsey