You can always tell when we're nearing hatching time - the 24hr Protection volunteers start smiling again and cracking jokes. Well, some of them anyway.

Yesterday morning (Tuesday, 24th May) we saw the first crack in Egg No1. By mid afternoon it had evolved into a 5mm hole and by 8pm we could clearly see an egg tooth chipping away at the egg shell as the chick attempted to break free.

Here's 15 hours condensed into two minutes:

Osprey chicks don't often hatch during darkness hours, and this guy has been the latest to do so on the Dyfi, the previous late-hatcher being the first chick in 2012 (21:38).

Just to let you know, we will follow the convention of previous years in calling our Dyfi chicks Bob 1, Bob 2 etc until they are ringed in five weeks time. They will then be given 'proper' names and again be named after Welsh rivers and lakes.

Bob 1 was the earliest first chick to hatch on the Dyfi (36 days), but we have to remember that the egg was laid at 04:07 and he hatched at 21:54. If we counted the actual hours of incubation instead of splitting the data into days, this chick would probably be very similar to previous first chicks. Just a quirk in the way the data is presented.

We may sit down over the winter time when we have more time and work out a better way of comparing data between years.

Bob 1 has had a good day today, he looks strong and energetic, more so now he's had a few belly-fulls of flounder inside him!

Many congratulations to Kath Stevens who won the Guess the Hatching competition! Kath was just over an hour away with her guess of 20:47. Please get in touch.

All eyes now turn to Egg No 2. We've not seen any activity today, but we're not eggspecting much activity until tomorrow morning.

A new life has commenced here on the Dyfi with us and we couldn't be happier