We arrive at the peak of the year with the colours still changing on the picture of the Glaslyn Valley. Those deeper, solid shades of high summer are now fixed in the trees and on the grassy plains but there are bright highlights among the different tints of green. This is a time of pinks and purples with the foxgloves dropping the last of their blooms, the rosebay willowherb spreading in great swathes along the roadsides, the prickly thistles standing in the field borders and the vast carpets of heather bringing colour to the hillsides and moorland tops.

This season has been one of contrasts, from the blazing sun under the cloudless blue to the cool, grey covered by the enveloping gloom. We have gone from a dry spring into a downpour-ridden summer with heat followed by chill followed by heat followed by chill. A bright, still and warm morning, turned into a cloud-dotted noon to an afternoon made heavy by a gathering storm. As the dark, brooding masses rolled in from the coast, rumbles of thunder were accompanied the flashes of lightning and walls of rain brought in on strengthening winds. The anger of the heavens skirted around me with only a few drops landing overhead but in the distance, the hills and fields were getting another deluge.

The young of the Glaslyn are growing fast; the badger cubs, now half the size of their parents, are out in the daytime searching for food after the rains have softened the ground. The fox cubs are feeding themselves but still go out on foraging trips with their parents, learning new skills but still finding enough time to play. The otter family is also travelling widely within their mother’s territory using different holts as the river rises and falls with the coming and going of the rains. The young bats are now flying on their own, leaving the protection of the old barn in the warm evenings to catch the midges swarming above the Glaslyn waters. Above the valley floor, high up on the moorlands, the curlew chicks are learning to fly and the young hen harriers are taking to the air but not yet as skilled as their skydancing parents. The young of some of the winter visitors are also flying and independent, the fieldfares and redwings are on to their second broods leaving the earlier chicks to fend for themselves in amongst the Scandinavian forests; it will be many more weeks yet before the whooper swans are on the wing for the first time.

The bird life in the valley is still growing with the last fledglings flitting around the woodlands and drystone walls. Family groups of swallows are chasing around above the fields and skimming low over the river and a young woodpecker calls alarm from behind the branch of an oak tree. There are two jays squabbling as they fly between copses and high above them all is a buzzard calling out as it circles on a short-lived thermal. Along the river, a pair of swans feed on the weed below, reaching deep into the water, risen again by the recent rainfall. Small shoals of fish race from shadow to shadow under threat of the kingfisher sitting, watching, prone on the overhanging branch.

The day brings the final long awaited moment in the nest at the top the fir tree. The last of three chicks, after days of exercising and short hoverings above its home, launches itself into the unknown for the first time. After seeing its two brothers fly over the previous few days, it is the turn of the youngest to put faith in its wings. A short, unsteady and alarming first flight lasts only a minute and ends with a collapse back into the nest – relief for the chick and its watchers.

As I turned up at protection today Z8 was flapping his wings like nobody’s business and he looked like he might make his first flight at any moment. I didn’t have long to wait but it was with disappointment that I saw him fly only as far as from the nest to the perch, where he stayed for a good long while. Eventually, while my attention was on my report writing and not the TV screen, he made his leap of faith into the air. He flew around the nest, flapping wildly and very ungainly until he eventually landed safely in the comforting bowl of the nest. His brothers had made their own first flights over the past week and with all three now able to leave the nest it brings another mark of success for ospreys in the Glaslyn Valley – three more ospreys fledged from this most significant of nests.

The last two weeks of July and the first two of August, in which we are now, really do mark the high point of the seasons, the country at its highest ebb and a mirror of the lowest ebb at the end of January/beginning of February. This is the warmest time of the year (albeit not in the Valley today!), with the plant life at its fullest. Yes, this moment might not have the burst of energy of spring’s cacophony of new life but it marks the peak of the northern hemisphere’s powers and from where we can look down on the rest of the seasons. With nature’s most intense breeding period coming to an end and the young of the year starting to flourish on their own, it is time for the adults to rest, recover and rebuild their strength for the autumn and winter to come. That being said, the osprey parents still have some fishing to do, to ensure their offspring are ready to make their first journeys south when the autumn does come.