YET MORE HUMBLE PIE

I DON’T KNOW WHY I BOTHER; I really don’t! Yesterday evening I wrote that JW6 had definitely maybe left on migration. Not been seen, longer absence than normal…blah…blah. I downloaded yesterday’s recordings as I do each following morning, came home to review the footage…and guess what? JW6 brought a tatty tail end of a fish onto the nest at 1410 yesterday, in the middle of a heavy downpour of rain!

Now, in my defence, I have to say that I never said anything absolute but I was pretty convinced that she’d gone, especially when the day before yesterday, Samson was struggling badly to fish and I saw no deliveries to the nest for the whole of the 13 hours that the camera was on. I thought she’d have come and helped if she was around. Furthermore, the chicks seemed as surprised as I was when she landed and were actually mantling in a very defensive posture as she approached, far from their normal food begging behaviour. Yet, despite all that, there she was and it was noticeable that she was treated with more respect than Samson has been by them. A delivery yesterday morning, which Ursula got, meant that Samson had to endure Jed’s disappointment as Jed really was quite vicious in tugging at Samson’s foot and also had a beak full of Samson’s head feathers which he refused to release.

JW6 disappeared off very quickly and went straight across the field and out of sight. Samson might not have even realised that she was about. She wasn’t seen again on camera later yesterday and I didn’t see her today when I was down there. So who knows? I apologise to all those people that keep data on such things but JW6 had definitely NOT migrated by yesterday afternoon but she definitely might have done as I write this.