Thats it! February is done and dusted. Winter has come to an end and spring (kind of) starts tomorrow. No doubt we’ll still be scraping the ice of our cars, but thats not the point! With March comes the first Little Ringed Plovers, Wheatears, Garganey, Swallows, Willow Warblers and of course….Ospreys. The first Ospreys back on territory tend to be the Rutland Water pair with a typical return date of March 15th, which is only a couple of weeks away. As a charity we’re busy prepping for another jam packed season (hopefully) and are looking forward to what the year ahead provides. Will we see CJ7 and 022 return? Will we see more translocated Ospreys come back? will we see more than one successful Osprey nest? Will we see nesting eagles???!! Ten years ago when we started the charity, we never thought we’d be able to pose these questions in our daily sightings blog, but here we are 10 years later being able to realistically expect the answer to be ‘yes’ to each of these questions at some point over the coming years.

Today the excitement didn’t stretch that far, although the White-tailed Eagle pair were active in the south of the harbour with male G463 even paying a visit to the Houseboats this afternoon in Bramble Bush Bay, Studland. Perhaps checking out the properties at Sandbanks? This morning 7 Marsh Harrier came out of the roost and a Red Kite was in Middlebere. The 2 Cattle Egret were again near the Purbeck Sports Centre roundabout, this time on the road verge opposite the Worgret Manor Hotel.

Cattle Egret – Worgret/Wareham roundabout verge – Clive Hargrave