Another day and another set of completely different weather conditions. It’s been a windy day on the loch in comparison to the heavy rain of Thursday and bright sunshine of Wednesday but our Ospreys don’t seem fussed. Our chick is growing so rapidly, I’m just back from a couple of days off and I can’t believe the difference. It’s now got most of its feathers in with their distinctive blonde ‘highlights’ as you’d expect an immature bird to have and the white back stripe is disappearing. It is also is standing up and practicing taking its weight on its legs much more but not always successfully, I watched it fall over several times this afternoon as it tried to stand up. Our female continues to stuff it full of fish, even when sometimes it appears not to want food. We’ve not seen much of our male today; he’s brought a Brown Trout in this morning and has been on the nest a couple of times when there have been other Ospreys nearby. None of them have approached the nest and in one case neither parent seemed that bothered by a lone osprey flying past. We were watching the footage of the chick hatching today and it’s hard to believe that 32 days ago it was so small it and came out of something the size of a hen’s egg.

Out on the loch our Great Crested Grebe continue to incubate their eggs and maintain their nest. There’s about a week to go before the eggs hatch and I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of a couple of the eggs today as they were being turned. I was very worried about how the nest would hold up with the raised loch levels and winds but it’s still there, albeit smaller than it was.

A female Gooseander appeared with her four chicks which can only be a few days old. There appeared to only be enough room on her back for three of the chicks so there was a bit of a rammie between two of the chicks on her back and the one in the water for space. The one in the water succeed in pushing another one off her back meanwhile the chick furthest up her back, and out the way of its siblings, seemed content to sit and watch from its place of safety.

Over the feeding stations our young Great Spotted Woodpeckers are beginning to lose their red caps as their adult plumage comes through, soon it will hard to tell them apart from the adult birds. Now that our young Squirrels have worked out how to use the squirrel feeders they spend much of their time at them and never seem to be full! A couple of Wood Mice have been taking advantage of the seed and nuts that the birds and squirrels have dropped, picking them up and taking them into their hole near the centre.

Hello to all the blog followers who’ve visited over the last few days. There’s been lots of you recently and its always great to meet you all and find out who’s on the other ‘end’ of the blog.

Lindsey