Today is the first offical day of summer and the heavy rain of the last two days was a distant memory as once again we all basked in the sunshine. We could see how hot it was up on the nest as our female spent long periods standing on the edge of the nest to let the chick cool down. Our wee chick was obviously hot too as it could clearly be seen panting, as we’ve seen it’s parents do during the heatwave. As a result we’ve had lots of great views of our chick; seeing it move around, being fed by it’s mother and best of all our female ‘talking’ away to it.

Fish of the Day – today’s menu

Pike at 6:51

Perch at 11:04

Pike again13:09

Remains of the earlier Pike taken away and returned at 14:00

As you can see our male is doing a grand job of bringing plenty of fish in for our female to shred and delicately feed to the wee one. He has turned up on the nest a couple of times today looking to take over the incubation but no such luck and after a while he got the message and left again.  Our female seems to have stopped incubating the other two eggs, perhaps sensing they won’t hatch. We haven’t seen her turn the eggs or pay much attention to them at all today in complete contrast to earlier in the week.

In other egg news our Great Crested Grebe couple are once again building a nest out of lilypads in front of the hides. This nest does look stronger than previous ones and our pair obviously think so as an egg was spotted this afternoon. We’ll be watching them closely and hoping this nest is more robust than the other attempts and perhaps soon we’ll have a Grebe chicks too.

We have a fun family event here tomorrow ‘Osprey Chick Party’ between 10am  – 5pm where you can learn more about Ospreys and have some fun too!

Lindsey