A female osprey has laid her first egg of the season at the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Loch of the Lowes Wildlife Reserve.
Staff and volunteers at the reserve, alongside webcam viewers from around the world, watched osprey named NC0 reveal her egg just after 6:30pm on Tuesday evening.
You can watch the osprey webcam here.
Ospreys lay their eggs around 1-3 days apart, so staff at the reserve are expecting NC0 to be sitting on three eggs come Easter Monday.
For osprey eggs to hatch successfully, they need to be incubated around the clock for 5-6 weeks.
The Trust’s Perthshire Ranger Sara Rasmussen explained that this is a critical point in the season, as “if the eggs are left uncovered they can cool quickly, reducing the chances of successful hatching”.
She added: “We are thrilled to see NC0 lay her first egg of the season and we’re hoping to see her lay again in the next few days.
In Britain, ospreys were extinct for most of the 20th Century. Since the 1960s an estimated 300 pairs of ospreys now breed in the UK each summer.
The Osprey Protection Programme at the reserve is funded by charities like the Peoples Postcode Lottery. Laura Chow, Head of Charities at the People’s Postcode Lottery said: “The Scottish Wildlife Trust's Osprey Protection Programme safeguards amazing birds of prey and gathers valuable information about their lives on the nest”.
Thanks to the efforts of conservation charities like the Scottish wildlife trust, ospreys have been saved from extinction in the UK.
The Loch of the Lowes Wildlife Reserve is open seven days a week and also the live osprey webcam allows people from across the globe to follow events closely.
In the coming weeks, keen watchers of the ospreys will be glued to the webcam hoping to witness the osprey chicks hatch.
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