Events from the nest:

This morning kicked off with a headless fish delivery from 7Y at 4.51.   Our resident female then took the fish and enjoyed a long break from nest duties.  Our resident male has been spending a lot of time on the eggs today, spending most of the morning incubating and doing another hour from 13.00 until 14.06 this afternoon.  Usually male ospreys do only 20-35% of the incubating during day light hours but 7Y has often spent more time than this on the nest in a day.  Like last year he seems to be proving himself to be an excellent mate.  At approximately 15.15 7Y was seen flying over the nest with a fish, however, he did not take any to the nest and was later seen flying off again, hopefully to catch a one for his mate.

Our resident female has again been observed in behaviour suggesting she is listening to the eggs.  We are hopeful that we may see an osprey chick over the coming days.

Other wildlife at Loch of the Lowes:

Today on the loch things have been quite quiet with only a few species observed including mallards, tufted ducks and mute swans.

The feeders, on the other hand, have been busy as usual.  Today our visitors included a Dunnock, a Blackbird, Blue Tits, Great Tits, Coal Tits, 4 Siskins and numerous Chaffinches.

We were visited by 2 red squirrels today.   There are now only 121,000 red squirrels in Scotland and we are delighted to see them visiting our feeders.  The decline of red squirrels has been caused in part by habitat loss and the squirrelpox virus but the main threat to them is from the spread of non-native North American grey squirrels in the UK.  Grey squirrels are larger and have a higher number of food sources available to them.  This allows them to outcompete red squirrels and in areas where they both occur the breeding and survival rates of red squirrels tend to decline.

Lindsay

SITA Species Protection Officer