A busy couple of days for our young Osprey at Loch of the Lowes, with his increasing confidence and some more attempts at fishing being witnessed. Blue 44 is still not ranging a huge distance from the nest (our satellite tracking page is being updated today so you can see his latest journeys) but this may be because of the very poor weather over the last few days. Roy Dennis told me this morning that most of his satellite tracked birds are also sticking close to home so far- can you blame them?

Our male osprey continues to bring our youngster food on the nest, with 2-3 fish a day arriving – but it can’t be long now until he stops supply and gives Blue 44 the big hint that he needs to look after himself. Of course the big question is: when will dad leave on migration and leave the wee one to his own devices?

The chick has also had to put up with more intruder activity near the nest and on Monday another osprey juvenile actually landed on the nest! This bird is probably one born on a nearby nest and was exploring the area- all juvenile ospreys have the distinctive pale feather edges so it was interesting to see the two side by side.

Our apologies for the loss of webcam pictures overnight- we think has been caused the HUGE thunderstorm we had here last night which caused power cuts and a lot of flooding. The loch level has gone up nearly a foot overnight, and there has been lots of local flash flooding. Luckily all our birds etc are now able to ride out such deluges, and there are no vulnerable nests left to be damaged on the loch.

The rest of our wildlife has also been hunkered down in the wet weather a lot this week: our butterfly surveys all got rained off, the bats aren’t flying much and the red squirrels all look pretty bedraggled. As soon as the sunshine pops out again though they are all rushing around madly, and making the best of it- much like your ranger team!