This egg, laid on 9^th April at 13:48, breaks a few records:

• Earliest ever egg at this nest beating previous earliest of 12^th April (2021 and 2024) by three days
• It's Telyn's 22^nd egg at this nest (23^rd in all - she laid one at her Rutland Water nest in 2016 - disrupted breeding by Egyptian geese)
• Telyn has laid more eggs at this nest than Glesni (13 eggs) and Nora (6 eggs) combined

Telyn had been back at her Dyfi nest eggactly 13.0 days when she plopped. This is bang-on in line with her previous average with Idris.

Grunts 'n all - here's a short video of the egg laying (listen out for over-eggcited volunteers and visitors shouting from the Obs!):

It's been glorious weather so far on the Dyfi since Telyn's return and is set fair for a few more days. Egg 2 should arrive Saturday (12^th) and Egg 3 on Tuesday (15^th).

Will we get a 4^th egg this year? After all, Telyn's mother, Maya, keeps laying four-egg clutches; in fact she's just done so again this year.

Probably not, but if we were ever to get a quad-egg year, 2025 has the best chance we've had so far. It would be the first time this has been recorded in Wales.

And Finally

As we get more data each year, this chart gets really interesting. It plots the timespan between both birds meeting up again each year vs 1^st egg being laid. Osprey pairings are coded different colours.

So the (current) Telyn & Idris pairing are producing their first egg significantly sooner than all previous pairings. Why is this?

I asked the same question on Facebook a few days ago - thank you for offering an answer if you did.

Let's try and figure this out, there are a few things that stand out.

It always takes three days to produce an egg; this is a constant so is the same for all years. Secondly, there is remarkable consistency within years of the same pairing, the only exception being 2013 and 2014 when we had the Blue 24 effect, disrupting normal operations.

So the only stand-out differentiator between the years really is the male of the pairings. Monty pairings (1^st egg) were always up at around 16 days with Idris a whole four days sooner. So, now if we remember that a female osprey always has an assessment period at the start of each season, determining whether her partner is fit enough to invest her biology with for the year, we start to see the wood from the trees.

Female ospreys are taking less assessment time (in days) for Idris than they did with Monty (including Telyn, who bred with both). Around four days less, on average.

Monty did used to wander off for long periods early in the season, sometimes overnight! Maybe Idris' lack of 'galavanting' results in less required male-assessment time, enabling the females to flick the egg-fertilisation switch earlier with him than they did with Monty?

This is just a theory.... caveat here is that we are still looking at a relatively small data set, and only for one nest.

A record-breaking start to the year.