All eyes on skies as ospreys head home
With a cast of flighty characters, romance, tragedy, and intrigue, and many unexpected twists and turns, it is like a soap opera based on the lives of some very unusual families which came to settle in Wales, with ultimately a triumphant and uplifting ending.
There's Monty, Nora, Ceulan (deceased – got caught up in fishing nets in Senegal), Dai Dot, Einion, White 94 (last seen in Switzerland, 500 miles off course), and many – but not really that many – more.
And a new episode will start just weeks from now, when Wales' only resident ospreys return home from their migration to Africa. They always come back to the same nests, generally in mid to late March, or early April at the latest.
As this beautiful and rare fish-eating bird of prey strengthens its Welsh roots, so the prospect increases that they will spread east – into Shropshire – where the River Severn is already writ large in their inbuilt flight maps.
Persecuted and driven to the verge of extinction, ospreys have been successfully re-established in Scotland and have a toehold at certain places in England.
But for hundreds of years there had been no breeding ospreys in Wales. Their re-colonisation over the last 10 years is a success story which began at a nest near Welshpool. When an osprey fledged – that is, grew old enough to take flight from the nest – there in 2004, it was the first time in centuries that that had happened in Wales.
Ospreys were back.
There was a near miss though around the same time at another nest at Glaslyn, near Porthmadog, where there were two osprey chicks and hopes were high among the gathered osprey-watchers. But euphoria turned to despair when, on June 30, 2004, there was a tremendous storm which sent the nest, and the chicks, plunging 80ft to the ground, killing them.
The Welshpool nest which made history has not been graced by the presence of breeding ospreys since. However the Glaslyn nest has produced chicks every year since that initial disaster. Glaslyn is the site of the Glaslyn Osprey Project, which attracts thousands of people every year. They can watch the birds from a hide with binoculars and telescopes, or get up really close thanks to high definition cameras around the nest.
Since the pioneering Glaslyn nest, another breeding pair has become firmly established further south, by the Dyfi estuary. Of the three other known Welsh nests, one is further east in Mid Wales, at a hush-hush location.
Their story is told in a new book "Ospreys In Wales - The First Ten Years" by Emyr Evans, of Machynlleth, who has managed osprey projects in Wales since 2005 for both the RSPB and Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust. Profits from the book are being split between the Dyfi and Glaslyn osprey projects.
With the ospreys returning from their winter break very shortly, there is a big question – could this be the year in which an osprey born in Wales returns to Wales to breed?
"It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when," said Emyr.
"Five Welsh-born birds have so far returned to the UK, but not stayed in Wales. That's probably because there weren't enough birds around, so they went somewhere else. Now we have four or five pairs, and the nests act as magnets. ."
All being well the Dyfi breeding pair, Monty and Glesni, are expected back at the end of March or beginning of April, and the Glaslyn birds a little earlier.
* "Ospreys In Wales - The First Ten Years" is available from www.ospreysinwales.com or from Amazon.
