Here are the dates our chicks took their maiden flights:

🦅  OGWEN Fledges - 15^th July at 08:47 - 52.1 days old

🦅  LLINAU Fledges - 17^th July at 06:19 - 55.0 days old

🦅  ELSI Fledges - 19^th July at 10:39 - 54.1 days old

For the stats nerds, here's how Llinau, Ogwen and Elsi compare to all of our previous offspring.. 

It was no surprise that Ogwen, the middle chick and the only male, flew first. There is a good day and a half difference in fledgling ages between males and females.

Females are heavier, they need more time to get airborne.

Llinau fledged at day-break at 55.0 days old, a couple of days older than the long-term female average at the Dyfi nest. She is now a strong flier, as are her two siblings.

Elsi Drama

Just a bit of drama this year... Elsi fledged then disappeared for 27 hours!

No idea where she went, but there has been another fledgling in the area that is not one of ours which is interesting.

Elsi returned the following day seemingly no worse off having not eaten for over a day. Hunger always defeats fear in the end.

I'm off - see ya tomorrow 

Seve

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have seen on the 2026 ringing video us taking 'Seve' the rock out of the nest.

Ospreys regularly bring rocks, stones, slates etc to the nest - they use them to trim down their beaks, like a nail file.

Seve was picked up from the railway track (ballast - hence the name, hoho), by Idris However, before Seve became famous he's had quite a looong and interesting life.

With many thanks to Alec Maltman, Geologist and DOP supporter.

Basalt from Idris’s collection

"The piece is the igneous (once molten) rock basalt. 

Without a microscope, the constituent minerals can barely be seen, however basalt is consistent with the dark colour, fine grain size, the featureless arrangement of the minerals (e.g. no layering or directions of weakness) and the heavy weight for its size.

The fragment is angular, suggesting it has been quarried, but not recently as it is slightly weathered. Given its context, it is perhaps an old piece of railway ballast.

Likely sources of the ballast are the quarry at Tonfanau, though the constituent crystals of the rock seem too fine for that, or the Llanelwedd quarry at Builth. Besides the dark mineral pyroxene and cloudy pale-grey plagioclase feldspar that constitute basalt, this piece has a dull, blue-green mineral which is probably prehnite, unusual but known at Llanelwedd.

This would make the rock Ordovician in age, i.e. it solidified, probably as a lava, about 450 million years ago. It was then slowly buried in the Earth’s crust to a depth of something like 10 kilometres, to give the conditions in which prehnite forms, before being slowly exhumed to its present position."

Thanks, Alec. 

Seve now has his own cabinet and can be seen in the Dyfi Wildlife Centre on display. What a crazy story!