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It's only just two weeks since the first of the chicks hatched but they are growing up already! They have lost their white downy covering now. Their dark skin is showing through, with the beginnings of proper feathers developing. Only the youngest is still clinging on to bits of fuzz, with a little white head - this will probably be gone too by tomorrow though, and it will be dark all over like the others.

They look very different to when they first hatched - like little dinosaurs - and are around the same size as a thrush now. All of this development must be down to a hearty diet of fish, fish and…more fish! They have been eating loads, thanks to their committed Dad and his regular deliveries to the nest.

Yesterday morning, he brought a big sea trout back. He and his mate grappled around with it for a few moments, before she took it off him. Fish doesn't come any fresher than this, it was still thrashing around in her talons! She ate the head herself, which is a delicacy usually reserved for the male. The youngest chick was raring to go with a fiesty few pecks at bits of the fish, trying to get food for itself rather than wait to be fed by Mum and Dad.

Around 3300 people came to visit over the three days of the bank holiday weekend and our first community weekend of the season. At one point on Saturday morning, it looked as though the sand martins were trying to out number the visitors with a hundred or so flying close to the site. In fact we had a full suite of hirundines that day with swifts, swallows, house martins and sand martins all putting in an appearance.

Week one of chick watch has been fantastic, we've had a great time and the three little ones have been doing a marvellous job of entertaining us.

The youngest one is not much smaller than the other two but is a little slower at getting food. It may need just a little time to gain in confidence and then it will join in the battle of the beaks with the others, pushing and shoving to be first! Slow it may be, but it still gets a hefty amount of food. They all do.

In fact, the chick that seems to be the most dominant in the nest (probably the eldest) ate so much on Wednesday that we could see its crop (the soft pouch on its chest) visibly swelling and swelling until it looked fit to burst! A first experience of having eaten too much and it didn't look comfortable.

The chick did the only thing it could do in the circumstances and setled down for a little snooze. Sleeping it off seemed to do the trick and when more food was brought a few hours later it was grappling for more.

At first, when the chicks were only a day or two old, the adult female would offer up food and then eat it herself if the chicks didn't take it straight away - now she has gone to the other extreme, desperately trying to stuff chunks of fish into unwilling beaks this morning.

The female is still spending time sat on them, though as they get bigger and more wriggly, she fidgets more. When they get too big to sit on, she will sit very close to them 'mantling' - that means using her body and wings as a shield to try and protect them from the weather, not just wind and rain but the strong sun too. As you can image, perched high up in a tree top, there is no escape from the blistering heat of the sun on a hot day.

We witnessed our first fight this morning. The eldest two chicks were really going for one another, beaks snapping and head butting. It's a measure of how much they've physically developed in the last few days that they are now able to control their bodies well enough to fight with each other! It's harmless enough really, just an example of competitiveness amongst siblings. It's bound to happen, in the intimacy of an osprey nest there is no respite from each other's company.

No such squabbling down on the ground. We are all gearing up for our first community weekend for the season - 26, 27 and 28 May from 10am until 6pm. Come along and see us if you can, it should be great fun.

The Glaslyn osprey nest is now home to three beautiful downy white chicks. The final egg hatched on Sunday morning to the applause, whoops and cheers of 30 or more visitors in the centre. The egg had broken fairly neatly and the domes of both ends, with a clear, sticky coating inside could clearly be seen.

The little chick was wriggling in the bottom of the nest, blissfully unaware of all the nervous energy that had been focused on it from down on the ground over the last 6 weeks. The egg tooth that the chick used to chip its way out of the shell has done its job now and is no longer needed. It will grow out gradually over the coming days. Indeed, it's no longer possible to make out an egg tooth on either of the two older chicks.

Grow they most certainly will, especially with the amount of food that 'Dad' is bringing back. Since the third chick arrived, his instinct to provide has gone into overdrive and he has delivered a glut of fish to the nest. At one point, he was over one side of the nest feeding the chicks with rainbow trout whilst his partner was over the other side, feeding them a piece of mullet left over from earlier in the day.

We haven't seen them do this feeding double act before - normally we would expect only the female to be feeding them at this early stage. The male is as keen as mustard though and even brought the rainbow trout straight to the nest without first sitting on a nearby tree to remove and eat the head - he's Super-Dad.

In the next week or so, the chicks will start to lose the white bristly down that they have, with lots of white skin showing through, and will start to grow proper feathers. They will keep these feathers until they moult next year. We have seen a few stray primary adult feathers in the nest over the last week or so. This is probably a sign of the adult female moulting and growing new ones. This happens a feather or two at a time but now is a particularly good time for her to do this, as she isn't flying much at the moment and she will need to be at her peak by the time she migrates back to Afirca, probably in early August.

Speaking of flying, the chicks are having an easy time lolling around at the moment but all of their growing and learning over the next 8 weeks will be building up to the moment when they waddle to the edge of the nest and plunge off to take their first flights. But, it's way too soon to think of that yet. Let's just enjoy them for the moment, whilst they're still tiny little fluff-balls - they don't stay little for long...

Over the coming bank holiday (26, 27 and 28 May), we are holding a community weekend at the osprey viewing site. There will be stalls with local crafts and produce on sale, a chance to meet local organisations, or take part in competitions and children's activities. Oh yes, and see the ospreys of course!

Just like on any other day here at the viewing centre, it's completely free of charge and will be a great chance to see the newly complete osprey family. Looking forward to seeing you.

Thirty-six hours after it's older sibling hatched, chick number two broke out as well.  At 11am yesterday morning, the female got up for a stretch and, behold, there was not just one fluffy body underneath her but two!  As you can imagine, the 20 or so people gathered around the screens went wild!  It was a great moment.  The female had been wriggling and wriggling since around half past ten, so things must have been going on below for half an hour or so.  With only one and a half days difference in ages, there is very little to choose between the two, they both look exactly the same.  The only slight apparent difference yesterday was that the egg tooth was a little sharper and more prominent on one beak than the other (we really can see them in such detail!), so we assume that was the newest of the two.  The second chick experienced its first feed at around 2pm yesterday afternoon and has had several since.  It is clear when feeding that one chick is just a little more clued up than the other.  It turns its head in the right direction and seems a bit more in control - probably the elder of the two.  The female is very careful and tender when feeding them.  She offers up tiny fragments of fish to whiever beak is available, but she doesn't hang around - if neither beak takes it, she just swallows it down herself!  The chicks are propping themselves up on their tiny little wings when they feed, reaching up as high as possible.  Their heads look huge compared to their skinny little necks and they have not yet got the muscles or experience to know how to control their heads properly - they flop around like unruly puppets sometimes.  In these very first days though, they spend much of the time snug and warm under their mother, just like the last 6 weeks when they have been in the eggs.

Egg number three is still snug and content in the nest.  If it follows the pattern of the others then it may hatch this evening.  However, even inside the egg, the chick is likely to be aware of the increased activity in the nest - more movement and sounds around it - and may want to break out sooner rather than later to join in the chick jamboree - could we have a full house by the end of the day?

 

We have a chick!  It hatched at the rather unsociable time of 11:17pm last night, so none of the visitors got to see the great event, but it was watched on the night camera by members of the 24-hour protection team. 

The female is still incubating the remaining two eggs but, when she gets up to turn them and stretch her legs, we can zoom in on the chick and see it in all its fluffy glory.  It is almost pure white but already the distinctive dark eye stripe, which is so characteristic of ospreys, is visible.

The chick had its first feed at 10am this morning, watched by the first visitors that had begun to arrive for the day.  It was only a little feed, consisting of a few morsels of fish but there have been a further two feeds throughout today.  The male, already aware that he has more mouths to feed, had brought back two by mid-afternoon and flew right over the viewing site at around 4pm, possibly going out for more.  As well as hungry chicks to keep sustained, the adults' food requirements will also increase as they use up energy caring for their new arrivals.

We have had masses of people here today checking out the little one and we expect even more over the weekend, as we are hoping for a second little beak to emerge on Saturday.  Let's hope the next is more considerate of its viewing public and comes out when we are all gathered around the screens in the visitor centre.

 

 

 

 

It's exactly 37 days today since the first egg was laid and we are expecting a chick to emerge from it at any moment.  Both adult birds have been very agitated all day and it's clear that something is afoot.  When the male brought a sea trout back at around 11:30am this morning both birds had a nibble at it on the nest - which is most peculiar, they usually prefer to retire to a tree before they tuck in.  Neither of them want to be away from the nest, even for short amounts of time, as the big moment is imminent.  The female, possibly in a frenzy of pre-hatching madness, has been a littl odd today.  Not content with eating the sea trout that her mate brought back, she flopped it on top of the eggs and has since been sitting on both trout and eggs!  It's not really clear why.  The only thing that we can think of is that she's aware that she will have a chick to take care of very soon and wants to be prepared.  She will probably try and feed the chick more or less straight away and perhaps she has put that fish aside for its first meal.  Hope the chick doesn't take too long to arrive or things could get quite whiffy up there. 

 

 

With hatching just days away, the excitement around the viewing site is reaching fever pitch.  Chick number one is expected to put in an appearance in the middle of next week, so all eyes will be fixed on the screen in the visitor centre from Wednesday, as we all await a first glimpse of the fluffy one.  The female osprey will be the first to sense that something is going on, she will be aware of extra movement inside the egg and tapping sounds as the chick chips away at the inside of the shell with its 'egg tooth' - a special little tool on top of the beak for breaking through the egg with.  The female will probably keep getting up off the eggs to check on progress, as it could take half an hour or so for the chick to fully emerge.  

As we enter the final week of incubation, it has to be noted once more just how active a role the male has taken this year in nurturing the eggs himself.  Usually it is estimated that the female will take on more than 80% of the incubation duties, with the male taking over less than 20% of the time, but this male has done over and above his share this year, the pair work wonderfully together.

Don't forget, the Glaslyn ospreys will be featured on Iolo's Welsh Safari on BBC One Wales on Monday night (14th) at 7:30pm.    

 

We have captured some jaw-dropping footage of the female osprey from the nest-cam this weekend - some of the best footage we have ever seen here.

On Sunday morning, at around 10.30 am a big clump of visitors were huddling inside the centre, as the weather wasn't great. The male had brought a fish back and the female had taken it just a few feet away and was sat on the nest tree eating it - on a thick branch that grows off the main trunk behind the nest-camera. With a little experimental manoeuvring on our remote control, we managed to spin the nest-cam round 180° and focus in on her as she ate - fantastic! Every feather and talon was as clear as if we had been sat in the tree with her.

As she ripped into the bright red flesh of the rainbow trout the whole visitor centre was mesmerised. About two-thirds of the way through the fish, she jiggled it around in her talons to try and get at the flesh on the tail end but it slipped from her grasp and plummeted to the floor. Everyone expected her to go after it but she didn't worry herself - there is plenty more where that came from thanks to her mate, who brings back an endless supply of food.

The feeding footage was so good that we showed the recording to visitors throughout the day, who were all suitably thunderstruck - it certainly more original bank holiday viewing that the usual James Bond film.

The female brought a huge branch of sycamore to the nest last week - another addition to their ever-growing home. They do seem to like bringing back green, living branches. Sometimes they just fly at a tree, grab hold of a branch and wrench it right off. They have been bringing branches of pine back quite regularly - a natural air-freshener for the home perhaps.

It can be quite a blustery spot here on the flood plain. The nest itself is particularly exposed to the elements and we can often see the osprey's feathers being blown around in every direction. On the whole though, we have had a glut of warm and peaceful days since the eggs were laid. This consistent weather with only minor variations in temperature helps the incubation process go smoothly, so there shouldn't be any surprises. Hatching is predicted to begin in 8 days time - watch this space.

The battle of the birds has been ongoing all week, as the osprey pair continue to fend off challenges from other species. On Tuesday morning at about 7:30am, before the day's visitors arrived, a female Goshawk plunged high out of the sky from the right of the nest. She flew like a jet-fighter towards the female osprey, who was also up in the air at the time having a little fly around as the male incubated the eggs. The goshawk pulled out of the dive at the last minute, avoiding a collision by inches. The female osprey defended her territory well, as she has done against every other bird that has looked like posing a threat to her family. It didn't take long to see the goshawk off. A few moments later, it made a hasty retreat back towards Moel Ddu, and has not been seen since.

It's almost as if all the local resident birds are testing the osprey pair out to see how sharp they are and whether there are any holes in their defence strategy. There aren't of course. This pair are young enough to respond energetically but experienced enough to know that potential threats are all around.

One mystery that had been puzzling us has been solved this week. You may remember that a couple of weeks back, we were baffled by the bizarre 'winking' that the ospreys have been doing whilst sat on the nest. By zooming in on the birds, we could see that they were in the habit of closing one eye as they sat. They are still doing it and it really looks quite comical - many visitors had commented on it. Well, a group of visiting students and an ecology expert from Bangor University happened to stop by as part of a field trip this week and think they have the answer. It is likely that this is the osprey's way of snoozing. Ospreys, like most birds, don't sleep in the same way that humans do. Instead, they will shut down one side of the brain at a time to rest it, closing one eye as they do so - literally getting a few winks of sleep. The other side of their brain, meanwhile, is alert and wide awake.

An extreme example of peculiar sleeping habits among the bird world occurs in swifts, which sleep whilst flying - just grabbing a few moments at a time! Actually, swifts are supreme flyers and do almost everything else in the air too including mating and eating. In fact, fledgling swifts spend the first few years of their lives entirely in the air without landing at all. This is a great time of year for swift spotting as these birds are just starting to return to the UK for the breeding season. You are likely to see them flying high in the air, often in excited screaming groups - look out for their sooty brown colour, long wings and short, forked tail. They have not been seen at the Glaslyn osprey site yet but we should have a handful or so over the next couple of weeks. Our friends in the RSPB reserves at Conwy and Ynys-hir tell us that they have a few swifts already.