Ceulan has been flying exactly four weeks today. He's 81 days old and he's entering a time in his life when the urge to fly south gets stronger by the day. We've watched him develop his flying skills on a daily basis and he has honed his skills to perfection, handling the strong winds of the past week with relative ease. We can now award young Ceulan his fourth and last pilot's stripe - he's now in the Captain's seat.

Feather growth is now fully developed, helping Ceulan master the art of flight

So, with a month's worth of tracking data, how far has he been? Well, actually, not very far. Ceulan has stayed relatively close to the vicinity of the nest, spending a large amount of time low down on the reserve watching the day go by. Quite often he stands on the ground, something that his siblings did last year but is still quite uncomfortable to watch. Is this normal? You would think that young ospreys would be more prone to attack down on the ground - this is part of the ecology of British ospreys that we are still learning about. Will he have a tendency to perch on the ground in Africa? Perhaps this is the more telling question, with a lot more ground predators around there.

Ceulan has undertaken one journey of note to date. On August 14th, he flew south and at 13:00 was at an altitude of 360 metres flying at 9 mph over the River Ceulan near Talybont. Isn't it incredible how these things seem to work - his first flight of any distance and he flies directly south to the river he's named after. An hour later, he'd made the six mile trip back and was sitting on his nest. Surreal.

 
Ceulan decides to visit the River Ceulan last Tuesday afternoon

Today I've been looking over some data on migration ages of British ospreys. There's surprisingly little information out there.

There's a good reason for this: Of all the 270-odd nests we have in the UK, how many are studied in such detail that each chick is followed from hatching all the way to fledging and then migration? Not many. It's distinguishing two or three chicks apart from each other in the nest that's the problem, and even if you can do that, they need to be satellite tagged to have a definitive date of departure. There are only a handful of nests, less than five out of 270, that this information is available for in 2012, and a lot less in previous years.

As I mentioned in last week's blog, the variation in migration ages of juvenile ospreys is huge. One bird might start off just three weeks after fledging, another osprey of the same age can take two to three months! There seems to be an average of around 90 days old, but I emphasise, this is from a sample of birds that would not be scientifically significant due to the lack of data and sample size. If Ceulan goes at 90 days, that's on August 27th, a week Monday.

Ceulan now spends most of his time alone - what lies ahead of him?

The Dyfi Osprey Project closes this year on Sunday, September 2nd. If you're within travelling distance, come up and see young Ceulan before he goes - the weather looks better this coming week. If you can't come over but you would like to enter a competition to win a Ceulan mug, have a look here. It's easy - all you have to do is predict the correct day and time Ceulan will set off on his journey south, and the mug is yours. Nearest guess wins.

It's getting to that happy-sad time of year again, we're all feeling it at the Project. For now, we enjoy watching Ceulan and Monty fighting off the crows and magpies that harass them on a daily basis. Soon, it will be the corvids only that we have left for company.

Should I stay or should I go..