The RSPB are celebrating the achievements of a record breaker this week, after observing a female osprey returning for an unprecedented 20th consecutive year to her Scottish nesting site.

Known as ‘the Grand Old Lady of the Loch’, the bird is 25 years old, an age more than three times the average lifespan of an osprey.

With the completion of another gruelling 3,000-mile migration from her wintering grounds in West Africa to her summer breeding territory at Loch of the Lowes in Perthshire, she has now travelled a total distance equivalent to around halfway to the moon.

The Grand Old Lady of the Loch was spotted landing on her usual tree-top nesting site, known as an eyrie, at 2pm on Tuesday. It is expected that her regular breeding partner, a male osprey identified with a green leg ring, will arrive within a week. He will then chase away any other interloping males before initiating the breeding process.

Emma Rawling, Perthshire ranger of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, explained her amazement at once again seeing the bird, but damped expectations of whether the osprey could add to the 46 chicks that she has bred:

“We are truly amazed at the tenacity and endurance of this particular female osprey. However, as a very old bird, her fertility is now in doubt. We will be watching the nest with bated breath to see if our female can hatch any chicks again this year.”

Once the first egg is laid, Scottish Wildlife Trust staff, aided by nearly 70 volunteers, will stage a round-the-clock watch to safeguard the ospreys and their eggs from threats including thieves and poachers who steal unhatched eggs for private collections.

Using a camera hidden in the bird’s nest, live footage of the events within will be aired over the course of the season, both in the Loch of the Lowes visitor centre, near Dunkeld on Tayside, and on the Scottish Wildlife Trust website.

“More than 20,000 visitors come to Loch of the Lowes each year to enjoy watching the osprey, and our high definition nest camera makes viewing the action a far more exciting and intimate experience,” said Peter Ferns, the visitor centre manager.

The Grand Old Lady of the Loch may have given wildlife experts a shock with her appearance this year, but it was not so long ago that the sight of any breeding ospreys would have been a cause for celebration.

Ospreys’ lives are often cut short by the numerous hazards that they face on their long migrations to and from West Africa and persecution in the first half of the 20th Century forced them to the brink of extinction.

However, successful protection and breeding programmes saw their numbers experience an upturn in the 1950s, and now there are an estimated 200 breeding pairs in Scotland, with the birds also recently having recolonised England and Wales.

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