Over the last couple of days Blue 44 continued travelling south west through the Aquitaine region of France and now appears to be resting up by a large lake, the Etang Blanc, approximately 50km (30 miles) from the French-Spanish border and only a few kilometres from the Atlantic coast.

The Etang Blanc is part of a Natura 2000 site – a Europe-wide network of protected sites designated for their diversity of habitats &/or bird species. It appears to be to Blue 44’s liking as he has spent most of the last 48 hours moving from tree-to-tree along it’s southern shore, presumably catching the odd fish in between times. His evening’s have been spent roosting to the south of the lake amongst woodland. How long he chooses to stay here only time will tell – we should know more in a couple of days time.

A potentially fascinating insight came into us from a member of the public over the weekend. At around 2:15pm on 8th September, when Blue 44 was travelling through Northumberland on the first day of his migration, two ospreys were seen flying south together along beside the main road out of Wooler. We checked the timing and Blue 44’s flightpath and they would appear to almost perfectly co-incide with this sighting. The observer was driving at the time so unfortunately wasn’t able to tell us whether a satellite tracker aerial was visible or not, however it seems highly likely that one of these birds was Blue 44. Which begs the question – could the other bird have been Dad? I guess we’ll never know but it’s interesting to think that maybe Blue 44 was following Dad, at least to begin with.

Hopefully we’ll have an update on Blue YD’s progress for you tomorrow.

Jonathan