I’ve been several times to Nimrod’s nesting site in last couple days and frustratingly have not seen him there, but it’s a very difficult place to overlook and there are hidden perches. This evening his GPS fixes came through, showing that he is regularly at the nest of in a favourite roost tree about 100 metres away. The great interest in having a transmitter on a male is that I can check his daily routines. On the 19th April he was fishing for small brown trout at Lochindorb at 11am and then after flounders off Nairn Bar at 6pm; he’s also visited fishing ponds at Glenferness and Auldearn. This will be some interesting research and I intend to track more males. The females, meantime, are just around their nests, by yesterday neither Morven or Beatrice had started laying, but they must be close.
Out early today monitoring nests on the lower River Spey, and found three pairs incubating eggs, and solitary males at the other two nests – it’s been a late season for some of them, although four ospreys together over my house this afternoon suggest that more have arrived – the local male was seeing off the intruders. On Monday, watched an old pair building a new nest in a tall precarious dead tree – the main trunk had collapsed under the weight of snow in January – already they have built half the nest and should be ready to lay there early next week. At the next nest, I managed at last to read the colour ring of the male – a chick I ringed in 1991 and hadn’t seen since.
Talking of colour rings, thanks very much to the people who have sent in colour rings (including visitors to Mallorca, who had photographed an osprey with a green/white colour ring number 11 – it’s a local male caught and ringed by Spanish osprey reserachers in February). If you take digital pictures of ospreys, including flying shots, checks for rings by zooming in on the computer screen.