All three chicks were successfully ringed on Friday.

As practically everyone had predicted, the first chick is a female, and a large one at that. So large, she is the heaviest chick ever recorded on this nest and only the second heaviest between Glaslyn and Dyfi, so over 50 birds there.

KA1 - Berthyn - weighed in at 1,790g

Berthyn's two siblings are both boys and when we saw them all together on Friday, Berthyn towered over her brothers, Peris and Hesgyn.

If you missed the naming video - here it is:

We decided to ring the chicks just a few days earlier than usual this year at between 30 and 33 days old, which makes Berthyn's size all the more remarkable. Had we waited another week or so we could well be looking at a 2kg bird.

Here are our Dyfi chicks this year compared to all the Glaslyn and Dyfi chicks combined. Both brothers, Peris and Hesgyn, are more or less bang-on for where they should be for their age, it's their sister that is exceptional.

I have never seen such placid and calm birds as these three, probably a function of ringing them just a tad earlier than usual; we'll try and keep to this pattern in future years.

Trying to sex chicks at between four and five weeks old is harder than if we had waited another week, but we're taking DNA samples in any case, so getting one wrong on the day doesn't matter. We're pretty sure of the genders this year though.

Peris ready to go back in the nest

The Ringing Video

First, a couple of apologies.

I didn't have a professional microphone with me on the day, relying instead on the camera's on-board mic. It was so windy the audio came back distorted, which rendered it practically unusable. I try and leave as much audio in as possible usually so that you can hear the sounds that we hear, not possible this year, sorry.

Secondly for the delay. We aim to get these videos out the next day but there was so much footage this year it slowed my ancient computer to tortoise-pace. It took over 20 hours of editing in the end to get us down to five minutes.

A massive thanks to Tony Cross again for ringing our birds, his expediency and professionalism is unparalleled. The adults were off the nest for 58 minutes in all and the ringing took around 40 minutes, the birds' only contact with humans in their long lives hopefully.

Here we go then, the 2019 ringing video condensed down to a few minutes: