It’s been fairly quiet on the nest here at Loch of the Lowes over the past couple of days. Our chick is now 18 days old and continues to astound us with its remarkable development. Despite hatching over a week later than Blue 44 last year, it seems to have made up for lost time and is looking more and more like a young osprey with every passing day. The black banding through the eyes is clearly visible and its downy feathers are beginning to be replaced with a first proper set. However, it still has a lot more growing before those clown’s feet are in proportion with the rest of its body!

The intruders of previous days seem to be giving our resident pair a break now, so the only action of real note at the nest is when the male brings in a fish or the occasional stick. There were two fish deliveries during the day yesterday, one a brown trout & one unidentified. Two more brown trout so far today, including a huge specimen at 4:53 this morning, which was recycled several times. It’s highly likely that the male may do a further spot of late afternoon or evening fishing as the last delivery was at 10:20 this morning. Unusually the male was left alone with the chick today between 1:50 & 1:58pm. Thankfully he managed to avoid whacking the chick with a stick or landing on him during this brief period of being in charge!

Elsewhere around the centre we have a new family of Mallards and Pheasants. The pheasants have 9 newly hatched chicks – a fairly typical brood size; strangely however the mallard female appears to only have 4 ducklings. Whether some of the other eggs are yet to hatch or the young have been predated already we don’t know. Always nice to see them anyway – just a shame some of them will turn into marauding drakes!

Jonathan