At high tide this afternoon, I visited Findhorn Bay to check if the male ospreys were starting to sit around on the fence posts in the salt marsh. It was a very high tide and much of the marsh was inundated by seawater with lots of redshanks, curlews and gulls searching for food at the tide edge. And then as I swept round with my binoculars I could see two male ospreys perched on their usual posts. One was unringed but I was pretty sure that the other one, when I zoomed in with my scope, was ringed with a pale yellow colour ring. This was almost certainly the male that tried to take over Nimrod’s nest in April. I have one satellite transmitter still to use and this male would be an excellent bird to track. Maybe I can catch him in the next week or so.

I’ve seen up to 4 male ospreys fishing in the last week when the tide has been low, and one of them would surely have been Morven’s mate. See the map below to see the locations used by him (white dots) and by his near neighbour Nimrod (red dots). It’s very interesting to see that they regularly use different locations on the coast. Morven came back over the Moray Firth last Saturday and the data suggests she did come back through her nesting area, but she was certainly not there in the evening. Her chick was standing on the nest giving hunger calls to encourage his father to come back with a fish, but he soon flew off and was mobbed by a host of young swallows, which were hawking for insects over the barley field. I guess that Morven’s next signals will show that she is well down through the country like last year.

Beatrice has decided to stop over on the same river system (L’Adour) in south-west France which she visited last autumn and this spring. Just further north is one of the young ospreys from Loch Garten, which I helped satellite tag in the summer, which has decided to stop over in the estuary of the Gironde. We still have three male ospreys and one very late chick to leave Scotland and once they have set off on their migrations, we will update their individual pages.

The female Woodcock,named Askaig , is still on her breeding grounds in Siberia and it’s going to be very interesting to learn when she sets off and which route she will use to come back to Scotland, if in fact that is what she is going to do. The two young honey buzzards, that I satellite tagged, are starting to move around and have been up to 2 miles from their nest. I’m not sure if they are searching for their own food or are following their parents but they do come back to the nest wood in the evening.