It was another beautiful day in Moray, sunny and no wind, so in the morning I went down to Findhorn Bay to look for the last of the ospreys and to see if any interesting migrants had arrived. 11 slavonian grebes swimming with a group of scoters on the sea off Findhorn shore was new, but in the bay it was the usual assortment of waders and ducks. One of my friends had seen two ospreys, and when I went to the south side of the bay, I saw them perched together on an old log on the mud as the tide came in. I checked them out with my telescope but couldn’t see a satellite transmitter, although the heat haze was annoying. Next I scanned the river mouth where I had seen more ospreys perched a few days ago, but there were none. Obviously, these are last days this year for ospreys in the Bay.
This evening when I got the Argos data, I found that Nimrod had left yesterday in the late morning – when it had also been a lovely quiet sunny day. He’s already made a rapid flight south and as I write this he will be in Brittany. It will be fascinating to compare his last autumn’s migration with his new journey south – last night he made a very unusual switch from travelling down the eastern side of England he swung right across into Wales, picking up last year’s westerly track over the West country. Talisman is still here but looking at his GPS movements, he was not one of the two birds perched on the log this morning. The others are on their migrations, with Morven in Morocco, Red 8T in Mauritania and Rothiemurchus resting in Portugal, while Beatrice is wintering in southern Spain.
