by Lindsey, Wildlife Interpretation Officer

It’s been a funny old day weather wise with torrential rain this morning causing birds and volunteers alike to hunker down to avoid the worst of it. It wasn’t just the birds the weather caused problems for, one of our birdtables was so wet that when the Red Squirrel tried to jump on it and promptly slipped off!

Spring briefly put in an appearance this afternoon with beautiful warm sunshine and some stunning rainbows over the loch and with it a nice big fish from our male. There was, as ever, a bit of mucking about he showed her the fish and went off to eat the head, she shouted at him, he brought the fish in, she took it away, she brought it back, he took away again. At one point when she had the fish it looked like he was trying to muscle in which is not a good idea  but somehow he managed it and disappeared off with it again. In amongst all of this we had another intruder Osprey flying above the nest. Looking at the colour and size of the bird it was probably a male and not the new female. Our male went and saw it off.

Our male appears to be a more confident bird this year but he still a klutz. Cherry was telling me a funny story about yesterday when he got a fish skin tangled in his talons, he flew around with it for a bit before finally sorting himself out. Just to prove he’s not always clumsy here’s a beautiful picture of him  leaving the nest with a fish with our female looking on, thanks to blog follower Morag Screenan for this.