After a fascinating few weeks its time to say goodbye to our webcam and three (not so) little stars. The chicks are now three months old and will soon be independent from their parents. They are spending less and less time on the nest - only feeding there occaisonally.
Its a quieter time for us now too. For a change of scene I'm working on Shetland for the next week, which I'm very excited about as have never been before!
A few weeks ago we were delighted to find that one of our nests had a breeding female who originated from outside Aberdeen. Red/pink E8 was born in 2009 near Dunkeld as part of the Central Scotland population. Below is a picture of her on the nest when her offspring were still quite small a few weeks ago.
E8 and her mate (who we haven't identified yet) have reared one chick which we went to tag last Friday. It wasn't till I was halfway through putting the tags on that I realised that the chick also had the tags E8 (except his were purple and white to show he was born in 2011 in Aberdeen)! Quite a cooincidence and nice way for us to finish off the season! E8 junior was a nice healthy male with lots of rabbits carcasses on the nest, and a good lining of sheeps wool.
The Aberdeen red kite webcam is not showing live footage today as there is a power cut at VSA Easter Anguston Farm for maintenance work on the cables. As you've probably seen the young kites are spending lots of time away from the nest (probably in nearby trees) but come back in regularly as they are still fed there.
Hopefully the webcam will be back on early evening.
Firstly, apologies for the lack of blogging; I'm having trouble with the laptop at home and as you can imagine I'm not in the office much at this time of year!
Our webcam stars seem to have flown the nest, but are coming back in regularly for food and to roost at night. This morning I was at Easter Anguston watching an empty nest when C2 came and crash landed and started eating a bit of rabbit. Within half an hour the other two chicks had arrived and were either preening or snoozing.
All our other nests are doing well and today we tagged the 26th chick for 2011 in Aberdeenshire! We've still got a couple of nests still to do, but below are some pictures from the last week or two. Its been very busy but so enjoyable as we really are seeing how fantastically well the birds we released are doing.