A Flying Visit
Live streaming wildlife webcams have never dominated Terroir’s leisure time. We’ve always enjoyed, indeed marvelled at, BBC’s Spring and Autumn Watch and many other programmes and websites which use them, but we’ve never been hooked. All that changed last week.
On a characteristically damp and misty journey through Wales, we passed the Dyfi Osprey Project located off the A487 near Machynlleth. ‘Not the day for a visit’ we cried, ‘terrible visibility’ we exclaimed, as we slammed on the brakes, turned the car and headed for the car park.
Thankfully the project’s new visitor centre is welcoming, light, airy and, on a wet June day, warm and dry. The seating features recycled church pews and the staircase is enclosed by curved, polished timbers, reminiscent of a whale’s rib cage.
But the big question is, are we going to see any ospreys? On one side of the visitor centre, partially hidden but still very eye catching, are four enormous screens showing the intimate details of ‘Idris’ and ‘Telyn’’s family life, perched high on a nesting platform, somewhere out in the mist. We’re hooked immediately. The quality is excellent, the action live, the volunteer on duty informative, cheerful and enthusiastic. To hell with the weather! The view is much better inside.
The male, Idris, has already swung past with a fish, and the two chicks have been fed and have hunkered down. We are told that ‘Telyn is doing her umbrella imitation’, and has spread herself over her sleepy offspring to protect them from the rain. It doesn’t matter that we’ve missed the male, that the chicks are invisible, that the nesting platform is artificial and that we are far away in the warm and dry. It is nature in the raw and is utterly compelling.
Osprey’s have long been a conservation icon. I can remember as a child, having an RSPB jigsaw puzzle featuring an osprey (Pandion haliaetus) speeding across a watery surface, a fish firmly clamped in its claws. Today, Wikipedia and most wildlife conservation organisations have website pages devoted to these raptors, although amounts of detail vary.
As with many raptors, their extinction from the UK was probably complex. The Victorian hunting/fishing/collecting fixation must have taken a huge toll, including egg collecting, shooting for taxidermy (not just antlered stag heads on castle walls) and probably to prevent osprey predation on sport fishing.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ospreys_in_Britain) suggests extinction as a breeding bird in England by 1840, and absence from Scotland from 1916 to 1954, when a Scandinavian breeding pair rocked up at Loch Garten, in the Cairngorms, north east of Aviemore. The RSPB’s Operation Osprey opened to public viewing in 1959, and ten years later the Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve at Loch of Lowes (further south, near Dunkeld) was also supporting breeding pairs.
Other conservation projects have followed. The ground breaking project at Rutland Water (Leicester and Rutland Wildlife Trust) produced Terroir’s first off-jigsaw viewing of an English osprey. Pairs have been successfully breeding here since 2001. Other Wildlife Trusts’ osprey havens include Kielder Forest in Northumberland, (first breeding pair in 2009), the Dyfi project in Montgomeryshire (a breeding pair since 2011), the Lake District (Foulshaw Moss – first breeding pair in 2014) and Llyn Brenig (North Wales Wildlife Trust, first breeding pair 2018).
Life is still tough for opsreys however and it’s not just about rain and wind. The Llyn Brenig centre suffered a horrific act of vandalism in May this year when their nest platform was felled with a chainsaw. Other threats include contamination of birds with mercury and organochlorine pesticides, entanglement in fishing line and being shot while migrating across southern Europe – the birds winter in Senegal.
Which brings us neatly back to Dyfi and the need to debunk the romantic myth that these birds mate for ‘life’. The birds live independently through their Senegalese winters; if one doesn’t make it back to Northern Europe, then the pair bond is broken and another mate has to be found; this may happen quite frequently in any one bird’s lifetime.
When Nora failed to return in 2013 (see time line above, right), the Dyfi website (https://www.dyfiospreyproject.com/) tells extraordinary stories of violent, aerial, all female, ‘cat’ fights taking place over the lonely Monty. The winning ‘gal’, christened Glesni, had to fight again, the following year, to retain her pair bond. Would Monty have accepted a new mate, if Glesni had lost the battle? It all sounds so Thorn Birds, so Foresyte Saga.
As it had stopped raining we ventured out to tackle the board walk from the osprey visitor centre through the Cors Dyfi nature reserve, to the viewing tower. No ospreys visible of course, but plenty of surprises. The centre is located in the lush, damp, Dyfi valley, formerly a peat bog, then planted with conifers and now being returned to bog again. There is plenty of open water to provide provender for a nest of hungry osprey chicks, but wet scrubland, rushes, and water loving wildflowers also abound.
Wet scrub
Wild flowers, left to right: ragged robin, yellow flag, water dropwort and cotton grass
As we climbed the viewing tower steps we were caught by a tangible buzz of excitement and joined the - socially distanced – row of assorted bird enthusiasts watching a couple of young long-eared owls perched in the willows below. ‘That’s a real ‘tick’ for round here’, one said. The Reserve’s dense scrub seems to suit them well.
The other, big, surprise for us were the beavers. The reserve has started a - licensed and heavily fenced - beaver colony to help manage all that willow scrub which is holding back re-conversion to peat bog. Two beavers – father and son - arrived in March and recently the mother was added to complete their domestic bliss. We gathered that, as the colony grows, it is hoped to create further enclosures to spread the impact of these ‘ecosystem engineers’.
Beavers have been extinct in Britain for around 400 years, thanks to the fashion for beaver fur hats, for beaver meat, for a secretion they produce called castoreum and probably because they were also regarded as pests. The recent re-introductions of beavers have not been universally popular. As far as Terroir is aware, there are no intentional, free-roaming beaver trials in England and Wales (please correct us if we are wrong) although the River Otter beavers in Devon have, we understand, been given leave to stay after the results of a five year montoring period (again, updates appreciated).
We didn’t see the Dyfi beavers (obviously - see below, right), but we did discuss project security with one of the duty volunteers. It is important that they don’t escape and the Dyfi beaver fence is, we gathered, inspected very regularly. We were particularly intrigued by a complicated device which seems to involve apples and carrots and a web cam (Dyfi Project, please forgive us if we haven’t got this quite right!); apparently the beavers can be relied on to visit this free food source daily, thus providing an easy head count on a very regular basis!
The beavers deserve a blog in their own right. And, in comparison, it sounds as though ospreys have had it relatively easy.
Now, back to that webcam….
© Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, reproduced with permission Image captured 16/6/21