Dulas seems to have settled down again. Having set off mid-January, just a few hours before Janine and the Rutland guys got to Panchang in the Gambia where he had been since early October, he now seems to have set up home around 175 miles to the south of his old location in the southern Tombali region of Guinea-Bissau.

His coordinates and data were very late coming through this time for some reason and for a few hours the satellite system had him in the middle of the Atlantic! It's only when all the data in a particular information window is in, that you can really refine it and put it through some sophisticated software; this in turn churns out all the way-points that you can see on Google Earth. Once that window is open, however, you can ask the system for a 'last known location point' - a kind of shortcut to save waiting for the data window (which can take up to 10 hours) to finish. The problem with this system, however, is that the point it gives you is not necessarily that accurate. This is the way-point that it gave for three whole hours during the last window.

Thankfully, three hours later Dulas was back in Africa once all the information was in. Clearly a rogue data point. That will teach me to try and fast-track the system next time!.

Two weeks after Dulas decided to venture south, he seems to have settled in the Cantanhez Forest National Park, a 400-square-mile protected habitat which includes Chimpanzees as one of the mammals in the Park. Not many of them on the Dyfi when he left. The national park is around 15 miles inland off a large estuary and river system on the Rio Cacine, Guinea-Bissau.

This habitat looks ideal for ospreys with plenty of waterways that you would expect to be filled with fish. Dulas is in almost the exact same location as where one of Roy Dennis' ospreys, 'Nimrod', overwinters. This is a bird that Roy ringed (Red 7J) as a chick in 2001 and subsequently satellite tagged in 2008, although at some point last summer the antenna of his tracker fell off, so now no data is sent. But Roy sees him every summer as he returns to breed at his nest near Kinloss, Scotland.

Nimrod - Red 7J.  Photograph courtesy of David Whitaker ©

In previous blogs we speculated whether Dulas' location just north of the Gambia would start to dry up in the new year - maybe this has happened? The dry season in parts of west Africa is particularly arid this year. Hopefully Dulas has now found a good spot near the sea, like Einion has, that is not prone to drying up.