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Making Tracks: Ospreys

Tom Waghorn
16/ 8/2008

ROMEO and Juliet and the three kids were looking bored and miserable last weekend.

Skiddaw was wreathed in cloud, the skies were weeping and the wind was whipping the surface of Bassenthwaite Lake into foam-topped wavelets.

Clearly the osprey family couldn't go about their business of plunge-diving for their fish suppers.

And this was a critical time. Mum and dad should have been preparing their chicks for their arduous journey south to tropical climes. Instead, all five were perched on pines in Dodd Wood and on lakeside stumps waiting for the weather to improve. They needed to put on plenty of weight before migration.

The long-winged brown and white raptors must be able to see their prey - perch and pike, for instance - before they can perform that spectacular splash-down from 60ft up.

They carry them off in their talons with the meal held head-first in torpedo fashion.

Since 2001, when ospreys first bred at Bass Lake, (as the locals call it), I've been marvelling at one of the great spectacles of British nature.

In April, the adults arrived on time from their winter quarters in west Africa.

Their artificial nesting platforms - huge eyries of sticks with splashes of white paint to look like droppings - were there as usual. But roadworks on the A66 apparently disturbed them at their regular woodland site and they flitted across the lake to another platform 60ft up a spruce.

Difficulties

The re-colonisation of the raptors in this part of England is managed by the Lake District Osprey Project, a partnership of the Forestry Commission, RSPB and national park authority.

Things have generally gone well. This year the Dodd Wood viewpoint and its telescopes were fine for the thousands of visitors.

But difficulties in fitting up a camera meant that the webcam feed's pictures of the birds on their eyrie, transmitted to Whinlatter visitor centre, were poor.

Throughout the nesting season Juliet seems to have relied on Romeo to catch the family meals.

But with migration beckoning, she too has joined in the daily hunts.

Juliet normally leaves first in mid to late August on the 3,000-mile odyssey, travelling through France and Spain back to Africa. Romeo stays to continue feeding the youngsters and by mid September all will have gone.

What happens to the youngsters? They don't normally return to breed for three seasons and there's a mortality rate of up to 70pc of juveniles in their first year. But one Bass Lake youngster, fitted on its leg with a tiny alloy identification ring, has recently been spotted in Norway.

I wish the ospreys bon voyage and hope they return to us at Bass Lake.

AN excellent booklet, The Lakeland Ospreys, written and published by David Ramshaw, is available (£5, including p & p) from 13, Beaver Road, Carlisle CA2 7PS. Cheques to David Ramshaw. The Osprey Project benefits by 50p from each copy sold.