2016 will be a challenging year for DOP.

We opened the Dyfi Osprey Project for the very first time in late April 2009 and ever since we've had grant funding to varying degrees. This year, notwithstanding funding for half of one salary, we're flying solo - financially that is.

It costs around £150,000 per year to run the project and we're going to have to find this ourselves from donations and other avenues, but fear not! We are determined to not only bring you DOP for another year, but (and as I always say) the best DOP ever.

So, without further ado, here are the 10 things you need to know about DOP 2016:

1. Opening Times

We will open our doors well before the ospreys return - Monday, 21st March; that's four weeks this Monday.

We will be open as normal: 10am - 6pm every day straight through until September.

Part of the osprey furniture - Alwyn and Janine will be back for their 8th DOP season

2. Live Streaming

We will be visiting the nest on March 3rd and 4th to service and clean the cameras ready for another season. We aim to have the LS ready for the beginning for the project, 21st March, but we may be able to bring this forward depending on a few logistical issues.

Unfortunately, despite the local BT telephone cabinet being fibre-enabled over the winter, we are too far away to be included. The good news is that we are eligible for Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP) which means even faster fibre broadband, but Openreach have given us no timescales on this yet other that it should be done sometime in the next 12 months. Worry not however, we will keep our three BT lines and bond these together to make sure the LS output you see will be the same HD quality as in previous years.

We'll start the LS with Camera 2 again for the first few weeks - this is the one that is level with the nest and gives amazing panoramas across the Dyfi valley.

3. Website

This website is five years old now and is looking a bit tired.

We have been working hard over the winter on a new site - a site that will have much more up-to-date information as well as the bread and butter stuff like Blogs, Live Streaming and Chat. It will include better information about the project, Cors Dyfi reserve, as well as a load of information about visiting - whether by yourself, in groups, schools, students, on buses/public transport as well as greater information about access, including disabled access. We will also have new 'bios' about the Dyfi ospreys.

The new website will launch on the day we open, 21st March

4. Shop

The new website will have a new Shop. Whoop whoop!!

Apart from calendars, this will be the first time that we will have sold anything other than at DOP. We'll start off with a small number of items and hopefully increase these as time goes by.

 5. Pin Badge

We'll have a new badge to add to your collection - you'll never guess of who...!

All our pin badge designs are based on real birds

Will be available in the new online shop of course, as well as in the DOP shop.

6. New Binoculars for the 360 Observatory

When we opened the 360 Observatory in April 2014, we were suddenly catapulted 200% nearer the Dyfi nest than we were before in the old Osprey Hide. The front window of the Observatory is only 195m away from the nest; one of the closest places you can visit to see live ospreys in the UK.

With some decent binoculars, we can actually see the colour of Monty's eyes, we're that close.

During 2015 a few very kind individuals donated money for a new type of binocular - the MONSTOCULAR!

We matched these donations with funding from Environment Wales and managed to get enough money together to buy a pair of these:

Volunteer Jill reads the leg ring of a firecrest 17.3 miles away "N0 T2 SMA11"

Never mind seeing Monty's eye colour - you'll see his iris dots as well!

7. New Water Pool

Visitors to Cors Dyfi will know that there are a few water pools on the left hand side as you walk down the new boardwalk. Work has just got underway to form a new, larger pool on the right hand side (near the first left bend).

The new pool will have deep, medium and shallow parts so that the ecology of each area is slightly different - this will generate the greatest biodiversity possible and will attract new species to this part of the reserve.

The new pool will attract a lot more species

8. Water Hide

The 360 Project comes to an end in a few weeks but not before we build one last thing with the funding - a new hide overlooking the pool!

Imagine all the plants that will grow in and around the pool and all the insects that these plants will attract. Now think of the vertebrate animals that will feed on these insects: swallows, swifts, sand martins - we may even see the odd hobby hawking over the new pool. Oh, and bats!!!

In fact, we've designed the roof of the new water hide to be bat-friendly so that they can roost/hibernate in the specialised nooks and crannies that we're building for them.

The hide will have lots of windows including low down ones for wheelchair folks and children. It will have two round windows too - just for fun!

9. Electricity to the 360 Observatory

After running with a small generator for the first season we were open in the Observatory, we realised that this should only be a temporary solution. The irony was we only needed a small amount of electricity - about the same as it takes to boil a kettle; the problem was getting it there.

We will now be able to have the nest cameras showing live in the Observatory in glorious 4K resolution. We'll have fun things for kids to do, we'll be able to run telescopes at night for star watching and have moth traps this far down the reserve.

Kim leads volunteers across Cors Dyfi reserve with 700m of armoured electric cable

We'll also, finally, be able to install a .....

10. Wheelchair Lift in the 360 Observatory

We've kept the best till last!

Back in 2011 and 2012 when we were designing the 360 Observatory, we did everything in our power to get wheelchair users to the Observatory.

The visitor centre has a ramp, we built the boardwalk extra wide (1.8m) to facilitate two wheelchairs passing, we built the lower deck over 2m off the ground and ramped 45m up to it on stilts and we duplicated the interpretation that's in the upper level on the lower level. Try as we might however, for one reason or another, one problem after another, we could not get wheelchairs to the top. Believe me, we tried so hard.

While many reserves do not even allow access for wheelchairs into the visitor centre, let alone any part of the reserve, we thought we were doing well. Not well enough though.

When we opened the 360 Observatory in 2014, it was met with enormous positive feedback and adulation, so much so, some people wanted to nominate us for a National Lottery Award. Fancy that!

There was a downside however, and a big one. Those visitors that were able to get to the upper level were so complimentary and excited about what they had seen and experienced, it made all our efforts into making Cors Dyfi as wheelchair-friendly as possible seem like an afterthought. Seeing one family pushing their wheelchair-bound son 600m to the Observatory and having to leave him on the lower deck, reading the information panels while the rest of the family walked up the stairs to see Monty and Glesni with their young chicks, was the final straw. If the Egyptians could build huge pyramids 140m high with stone and copper tools 4,500 years ago, surely to god we could get a young lad in a chair just 5m up a wooden building?

We revisited the obstacles we couldn't overcome in 2012 and tackled them again. Harder.

We couldn't get electricity from the railway line or from grid-electricity poles around 300m away, we had to do it the hard way - running cables all the way from the visitor centre. This week, 32 volunteers pulled and carried over two tones of super-armoured cabling to the Observatory - next week we connect it all up. The week after, we cut a hole in the Observatory lower floor to put two huge steel beams in to support the weight of a 'platform lift'. On March 14 and 15th, the lift goes in.

And it's not just for wheelchair users of course. Many of our visitors, having walked the 600m to the Observatory on the flat, are unable to walk up four flights of steps to the upper level. Not any more.

The whole project will cost around £30,000 and thanks to private donations and a £14,500 grant from Natural Resources Wales, we're almost there. At the moment we're around £5,000 short, but we'll worry about that again. Whatever is left to pay, we'll add it to the annual LS camera appeal in March.

Right there in the corner please Mr. Lift Man

Cors Dyfi and the osprey project will be inclusive of everyone and exclusive to no-one in 2016. It took two years, but we've finally made sure of that!