On Thursday 18 June the weather conditions were ideal to ring the young chicks, so an early start was essential.
At 9am that morning myself, Steve and Adrienne (from BTO), and two volunteers (Judith Babbage and Gwyn Harrison) were there to witness the occasion.
Steve climbed the tree and approached the nest while the parents flew overhead; the chicks were then placed into individual sacks and lowered to the ground. Adrienne was waiting at the bottom of the tree and ringed them in a matter of minutes.
The rings used were white with the letters YF, 90 and 91 on them – these will be used for future identification of the chicks. Both volunteers had a ringside seat and were delighted to be involved in a once of a lifetime opportunity like this.
Once they’d been ringed the chicks were placed back into their individual sacks and lifted back to the top of the tree where Steve was waiting. Within two minutes of us leaving the site, the male bird had landed with a fish and the female had started to feed it to the chicks.
Visitor numbers have been excellent again this year and we have exceeded 18,000 as of last week, and we hope this will continue into the summer season.
For those who are interested, pictures of the ringing taking place will be up at the viewing site by this weekend.
Back in June, we were fortunate enough to have a residential volunteer helping us on site. The volunteer lived in a caravan in Prenteg for a week and helped us with species protection on site, and monitored the birds and their activities on a daily basis.
I’d just like to thank her for her work and wanted you all to see what she thought of her experience, she said: “I had a wonderful time, everyone was wonderful. I felt that I was doing something useful and would definitely recommend this to anyone”.
We offer residential volunteering at various sites across the UK, so if you’re interested in this sort of thing and would like to know more please visit www.rspb.org.uk/volunteering
The chicks are four weeks old now and hopefully weather permitting we will be able to ring them sometime this week, we’ll keep you updated on how this goes.
The weather has been warm again over the weekend, although the mother doesn’t have to shade the chicks as much now as they are getting stronger. The chicks are preening themselves, which is a good indication of their health and their feathers are becoming very well developed.
The father is keeping away from the nest longer now - up to three hours - and is bringing back live fish to the chicks (complete with heads). This is the start of the learning process for the chicks and will help them identify what a fish looks like and how they can kill it, they’ll have to do this themselves soon enough.
A young blog follower has been keeping an eye on the ospreys closely and will this week give his first talk about he project to his Beaver Scout Group in Huddersfield. Matthew is a keen wildlife enthusiast and has visited the Osprey site several times this season alone - we’d all like to wish him well on his first ever presentation, and who knows he might be the next David Attenborough!
As we are approximately half way through the season I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the volunteers and staff, as well as visitors who have supported us so far this year – without their help and enthusiasm the project would not be possible, so thanks everyone for all your help.
There is a possibility the other ospreys could be the offspring to the pair that we have here now, although it is more likely they are the offspring from previous years until up to 2007.
All the chicks that have fledged at Glaslyn have been ringed but unfortunately, staff and volunteers have not been able to see clearly whether or not these ospreys are ringed
Osprey’s don’t mature until they are two years old, this means they have no mating instinct, and don’t go out looking for nests / partners. When they are two years old they will look for places to nest and then they will look for a partner in that same area. At Glaslyn, the male normally returns to the nest before the female and starts to build up the nest in preparation for another breeding season.
The chicks are growing up fast - the eldest chick is roughly half the size of the mother now, which is about the same size as jackdaw - the other two chicks are slightly smaller but are fast catching up with their elder sibling.
The weather has been changeable over the weekend, but it s a lot cooler now than it was at the start of last week, and this will make a nice change to the chicks and their parents.
Hopefully, the birds should be ringed sometime next week, but as always this is weather dependent, but we’ll keep you updated on this via the blog.