I remember the afternoon of Wednesday, June 29th this year very well. The osprey chicks were around three weeks old, it was a humid and muggy day, and I was talking to Chris, Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust's chairman, about the likelihood of all three birds surviving to fledging. The conversation was interrupted by the phone at the office ringing. "Hi, it's Martin from the BBC" uttered a soft voice. "It's Martin Hughes-Games, and we were wondering whether you had any plans to satellite tag your ospreys - maybe we could follow them during the Autumnwatch series on the BBC in October?"
The phone nearly fell out of my hand. For years we've wondered where Welsh osprey fledglings migrate to.. are they disadvantaged in any way by starting off from such a westerly nest? The problem was, these trackers have to be ordered especially from Columbia, Maryland in the US, four months in advance; we had no budget, and the chicks were already three weeks old! After some frantic phone calls to Tony Cross from the Welsh Kite Trust and Roy Dennis from the Highland Foundation for Wildlife, we came up with a solution. In a little over a fortnight we had three 30g trackers - the right size for ospreys. The race was then on to get everything sorted for July 19th, the perfect window to tag and ring the three youngsters at six weeks old.
After several hundreds of people kindly donated £4,500 after a three-week appeal to buy one of the trackers (the BBC paid for the other two), and a lot of help from Network Rail in getting us to the nest quickly along the train track under their supervision, we finally managed to ring and satellite tag all three ospreys chicks - three weeks to the hour from that initial call from Martin, as it turned out. This was the first time that Welsh ospreys had been tagged and, to date, this is the first time that all three osprey chicks from the same nest have been satellite tagged in the UK.
The BBC Autumnwatch camera crew getting to the nest on July 19th for the satellite tagging
