The Osprey chicks are doing really well with some guzzling food back like there’s no tomorrow! Our team now has a flowing process which sees the birds fed 3 times a day, with food that’s to be eaten as well as un-eaten weighed out so we can gage how much the birds are taking on board. The coming weeks will see us providing the chicks with as much food as they need as to get them in peak condition, ready for fledging. We still don’t know when that will be just yet but the end of July/beginning of August is a good benchmark. We’ll try and get some video footage from the pens shortly so we can introduce you to each of the 8 chicks. We were hoping to take photographs and provide a profile for each bird when they arrived but it was raining so hard that we just wanted to get them into the safety and security of their pens as quickly as possible.

Monitoring HQ

Sightings from around the harbour consisted of 6 Spoonbill on Lytchett Fields with 2 Dunlin, 5 Greenshank, 6 Common Sandpiper, 8 Green Sandpiper, 1 Whimbrel and 1 adult Yellow-legged Gull. The Hobby on the Arne camera in the main visitors centre is well worth a visit to watch. In Middlebere there were 2 Greenshank and a Green Sandpiper. On the Brownsea Lagoon an excellent 110 Common Tern chicks were counted with many beginning to fledge already. 

Spoonbill – Lytchett Fields – Ian Ballam