Here are the dates for all three chicks:

🐣 05:34 on 23^rd May (38.5 days vs average of 38.6 days)

🐣🐣 07:03 on 24^th May (36.6 days vs average of 37.0 days)

🐣🐣🐣 08:46 on 26^th May (35.5 days vs average of 36.0 days)

2026 is the 16^th year ospreys have bred on this nest and the first time a female had hatched a hat-trick of hat-tricks; that is, three chicks hatched for three years running. 

This is a phenomenal productivity rate for ospreys and is a clear indicator of how strong the Telyn and Idris partnership is.

Here is the updated family tree.. Bobby Bach (third chick) hatching this morning is the 11^th successive egg to hatch. The trio will be ringed at the very end of June when all three are between 30 and 35 days old.

Idris has caught a couple of nice fish today and yestrday, including this rudd - probably from one of the local lakes in the hills

Science (not on a) Sunday

All three chicks hatched very close to the long-term average for each respective egg.

Below is the chart (thanks Sarah) showing the 2026 brood and how they compare to previous years. The first chick hatched bang-on the long-term average with the second and third hatching slightly earlier than average:

And here's the chart showing all three-chick hatching spans at this nest over the years. 

So we know Telyn 100% did not employ a delayed incubation strategy this year. She sat on the first egg immediately after she laid it and both adults have been incubating continually, more or less, for five weeks. So how come Telyn has managed to essentially halve the lay-span (six days) to hatch-span (3.1 days)?

Each egg laid is progressively smaller than the last, but this is nowhere near enough of an eggsplanation to result in a near-50% reduction in hatch time. 

Telyn and Idris are strong, established parents now, maybe there's biological synergy somewhere, something that is not obvious to us observing humans?

Talking of things we don't quite understand...

The Gender Paradox

So now starts the guessing game of whether these chicks are males or females. Impossible to say at this stage, obviously, but over the next five weeks some clues will emerge.

Females will be 15-20% larger than males and possibly a little darker, but not always. Some people say girls fight more than boys, but I'm pleading the fifth on that one.

Statistically, the odds of getting a three-male or three female clutch should be 25%; so every fourth year, on average, we should see a three-boy or three-girl brood. But this happens a lot less often than once every four years. 

Even at this nest, with albeit a fairly small sample size to work with, we've had eight years with three chicks that we know the gender of each bird. So we should have had, statistically, two breeding years with a same-gender brood, It's actually happened zero times.

Why? Is there some biological control going on? Does nature intervene and skew the gender distribution in favour of a mixed gender brood versus a pure statistical outcome?

I don't honestly know, so I thought I'd ask Claude AI. I find this to be the most accurate of all the Artificial Intelligence language models out there when it comes to science-based queries.

Here's the answer: clearly a very reasonable response...... until it came to the last part!