On November 15th, Dulas headed off west from the area he had frequented for the previous seven weeks. In the last blog we theorised that his location at this tributary to the Gambia River had started to dry up, the rainy season is now well and truly over. As he reached the Atlantic coast, Dulas headed south towards the Casamance River, Senegal, where there are ospreys galore. However, he didn't even stop here, preferring to continue south towards Guinea-Bissau and by late afternoon on the following day, November 16th, he had reached Rio Cacheu - the country's northern-most great river (see bottom of map below).

The following day, he was headed back up north towards Gambia again, clearly his Portuguese wasn't up to scratch to stay in Guinea-Bissau. By November 18th he was back on the River Gambia and by November 22nd, a week after he started his journey, he was back at the same tributary where he started off from. It looks like he was even roosting and perching on the exact same trees that he had been for the previous seven weeks!

His anti-clockwise trip took him a week to complete and he covered around 400 miles before ending up on the same tree as he started off from. Up to just very recently we had no idea that ospreys were taking these long journeys in their wintering grounds. We know from other satellite tagged ospreys during the last three or four years that it is normal for first-winter birds to make these kind of excursions, very often ending up in the exact same place as they started off from. Indeed, Einion has shown similar behaviour, only he prefers the shorter, day-trip style vacation, his first was over 500 miles!

Often, it is not until the following spring that first-year ospreys start to settle down in earnest in one spot once the vast majority of full-adult birds have headed back to the UK for the breeding season. Ospreys don't usually return to the UK until they are at least two years old as they are not old enough to reproduce. It will be fascinating to follow both Dulas and his slightly less nomadic brother Einion over the next few weeks and months..