Telyn and Idris Return in 2026 - Finally

Both Telyn and Idris have returned safely to their Dyfi nest

Here are the dates and times:

🦅 30th MARCH: TELYN arrives home 14:20 (3 days later than 2025)

🦅 2nd APRIL: IDRIS arrives home 18:23 (12 days later than 2025)

Telyn (right) and Idris return

However, things were not quite as straightforward this year.

2026 is turning out to be one of those 'late years' we get now and again. Unfavourable weather, especially northerly winds in North Africa and Southern Europe have held up all migratory species from Africa.

Many ospreys have not been immune to this and several established birds have only turned up over the Easter weekend and into this week.

Idris arrived extremely early last year (21^st March), we also switched the live streaming on this year pretty early too - both these factors combined gave the impression Idris was late this year, which he wasn't really.

However, while Telyn was waiting for Idris to arrive, she did attract the attention of another male - Blue N0. He is a 2017 osprey from Foulshaw Moss in Cumbria. He's actually visited before, both in 2020 and in 2024 - see here

Ey Up - Blue N0 stayed a couple of days with Telyn before Idris arrived

Telyn rejected N0's advances initially, but once he started bringing her fish and nest materials to the nest, she soon relented.

Despite successfully mating for just over 24 hours, Idris soon put a stop to that once he arrived. As expected, there was no major conflict as N0's bond to the nest and Telyn would have been fairly weak after such a short investment.

So, to answer everybody's question: Will N0's DNA be in any of Telyn's eggs this year?

No. At least another 10 days will elapse before Telyn's body switches over to egg production and assuming normal pair bonding between Telyn and Idris during this time, all the eggs will have Idris' DNA.

Eggspect laying to commence from 15^th April onwards.

How do we know it's Idris every year? He is not ringed.

Even if Telyn did not have a leg ring, we'd know it was her every year.

Most ospreys acquire eye freckles (nevi) as they get older. With our high resolution cameras and a good zoom, we can compare these nevi to photos from previous years.

Telyn's nevi in 2026

We use the nevi as an ID fingerprint, making each bird unique based on their nevi patterns.

This is particularly useful for birds that are un-ringed - like Idris (although we do use other metrics as well like plumage patterns and behaviour).

Thank you to everybody that voted on whether you like the new nest weather station data on the live streaming this year - 82% of you approve. And thanks also for voting on the "what device do you watch mostly on?" Poll on the Live Chat.

Here are the results:

Quite an equitable mix between devices - this helps us accommodate various updates in the future.

As Idris gets ready for his seventh year with us on the Dyfi (it's Telyn's ninth year), here's a photo of him 'egg-cupping' - he's basically digging a deep hole for Telyn's eggs this year, so they remain safe from strong winds like we saw recently from Storm Dave (who names these storms??!).

The nest weather station recorded gusts of 57mph at their strongest on Saturday night.