FLIGHT FOR SORE EYES
Diane Bennett, project officer at the Tweed Valley Osprey Project, brings us the latest news from the nests... Osprey Project reveals exciting recent activity on their nest camera
TWEED Valley Osprey nest 2 has live streaming by camera to the screens in the Glentress Forest Wildwatch Room.
Here, all of the activity at the nest is recorded so that we can take clips of activity when anything interesting happens.
Our team of volunteers staff the Wildwatch room and greet people when they visit, to relay all the latest osprey news about what is happening with the osprey family. The volunteers chart the progress of the birds and carefully log any activity in the osprey logbook.
The volunteers are a dedicated and knowledgeable group of people who have been with the project for many years and we also encourage new people to join the team each year too.
It was particularly lovely this week that volunteer Marjorie brought along her granddaughter, Isabelle, to have a trial at volunteering.
Isabelle took to the challenge and monitored the activity on the nest, carefully logging any activity in the log book and based on her keen observations we were able to pinpoint a nice clip of footage of the male osprey FKO bringing a fish for Mrs O on a very misty day on the nest.
Mrs O took her fish portion from FKO and flew off with it to eat and then male FKO took a turn of looking after the eggs until her return.
Well done Isabelle, we hope that you will join the team and continue to be involved in wildlife conservation.
We had news of a Tweed Valley osprey visiting a nest at Kielder on May 1.
Male osprey blue 306 is one of a brood of three males that were raised in the Tweed Valley Osprey project area in 2019.
They fledged from a newly created nest which was made in partnership with Scottish Power who put up the nest platform onto a telegraph pole which they installed into the ground in 2018.
This was to replace the original nest site, the collapsed tree which the parent birds had built. 306 was one of the first brood to be raised at the new site. He has visited Kielder frequently, first time in April 2022 at nest 2, then in June 2023 at nest 6 and this year he visited nest 7.
He doesn’t have a territory of his own yet and is still intruding on birds which are already settled at Kielder nests.
Hopefully he will find a partner and a territory to settle into soon.
The Tweed Valley Osprey Project has been going for 25 years and covers the monitoring of nest sites from the source to the mouth of the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders to Berwickshire.
We have just found out that there is another Tweed Valley Ospreys, in Australia, in New South Wales and it is fascinating that on the other side of the world from us they are also carrying out similar conservation work for their population of ospreys and that they have the same set of threats and issues that the UK population have.
Ospreys in Australia differ from our Ospreys in that they are not migratory but are present mainly on the coastal areas throughout Australia but with a breeding population from Albany in the north, to the western Lake Macquarie in New South Wales.
Their project has gone from 2 nests in 1977 to 143 nests across the region in 2006 and they continue to put up nesting platforms and monitor nests to help them to thrive. Traditionally the osprey is known as the bihyin in the Eastern Bundjalung dialect of New South Wales.
Here is a really good website for the Tweed Valley Ospreys NSW – www.tweed. nsw.gov.au/environment/ native-plants-wildlife/native-animals/conservingthreatened-birds/osprey and their volunteer monitoring group tweedospreys. au
It tells the story of the Tweed Valley conservation work, documenting the progress of their conservation efforts and showing statistical data for their project. In the Tweed Shire, osprey observations are recorded from the Tweed Coast, to the upper limits of the Tweed River Estuary in Murwillumbah.
We hope to make links with the Australian run Tweed Valley Ospreys in the future and share news.