Despite doing quite a few osprey nest protection shifts in North Wales between 2012 and 2019, I never got to see one fishing. The nearest I’ve got to seeing one do so was some years ago in Swedish. I was canoeing down a quiet, slow-moving river when an osprey appeared a couple of hundred metres in front of us, rising up from the surface and shaking mid-flight to rid itself of the water in its feathers. We had missed the fishing attempt as it had been around a bend in the river; the bird had missed its target and flew away empty-taloned.

Today we went for a lunchtime walk to Pitsford Reservoir, only about 10-minutes drive from our house. We had a lovely amble alongside the waterside meadow on the nature reserve side of the reservoir. As it so often is, it was very quiet with only three other people seen in the hour we spent there (you need to be member of the local Wildlife Trust and obtain a permit, to visit the reserve).

We walked to the Bird Club Hide and sat in there for a while, using the eBird app to record the species of bird we saw. It does really feel like summer now with the common terns, sand martins and swifts all showing very well. There were also quite a few young birds about including geese, black-headed gulls and treecreepers.

However, the star of the show was an osprey which we spotted just as it lifted from the water’s surface, shaking the water off and holding a large fish. The gulls were flushed from their nesting rafts and gave pursuit but the osprey seemed unbothered by them as he disappeared into the distance. I say ‘he’ as it was most likely a male if the bird has a nest nearby and was catching fish for its chicks.

Here’s a very rubbish zoomed-in phone photo, clearly showing the fish in the osprey’s talons and there’s an equally rubbish video below that.