by Lindsey

A routine day on the nest with two fish in this afternoon, the first one was scoffed so quickly we didn’t get a chance to identify it, the second was a small – medium Brown Trout. Our chick continues to show its feisty character as at one point there was a tussle between mum and chick over some food. The female was feeding the chick but for some reason the chick decided to have a tug of war of the morsel. Our chick is also very bold and mobile and twice today wobbled up to the side of the nest and flapped it’s wings, this caused us some concern as it could so easily topple off and everyone was shouting “No, you’re a month too early”. The female spotted this and came over to the side of the nest gently stopping it from going any further. It looks like this chick will be keeping us on our toes.

Early this morning the female left the chick for over an hour, this is unusual but no cause for alarm she was nearby and able to come back quickly if there was any problem. There was an intruder flying over this morning and there was a flurry of excitement as we thought we’d seen an aerial on its back meaning it was Rothiemurcus, one of Roy Dennis’s satellite tagged birds. He’s been living in the area for a while so it would be quite possible but a closer inspection of the photos showed that the mystery ‘aerial’ was in fact a lose primary feather that was sticking up.

All eyes are on our Great Crested Grebe nest as they’re due to hatch any day now. The adults rarely get up but when they do we all jump to the cameras and telescopes to get a look and today I was rewarded with the sight of two eggs.  The Grebe chicks live on their parents back for the first wee while so the first we may know about the hatching is when a wee black & white head pops up from their parent’s feathers. We have a camera trained on the nest with a live feed to the centre so we can all keep an eye on it, hopefully there won’t be any of the drama we had last year when the Otter attacked the nest shortly after the second chick hatched. It didn’t get anything but it had us all worried for a while.