While Nige and Nicky have been hard at work rearing the birds for the conservation breeding programme, on the opposite side of the world Roland Digby is going through the same stresses, trials and tribulations as he raises chicks for the headstarting programme. Roland has six red-neck

Yesterday I visited the chicks to help colour ring them so we can follow the progress of each bird as an individual. I was staggered at their development- it was only a week since I saw them for the first time when the last brood was just hatching. Now they are all running around call

Another apology for the lack of blog posts. Things are still a bit busy here! Nige and Nicky are fine and the 17 chicks are thriving, although one has a bit of a leg problem which is worrying us, but we hope it will pull through. It may have fallen over and injured itself (these birds

For the past nine days, since the eggs arrived at Slimbridge, Nige and Nicky have worked non-stop. And I mean quite literally non-stop – 24 hours a day – grabbing two hours of sleep here and there in between checking the eggs and chicks. Their only breaks to see the outside world are

…here’s seven minutes of otherwise unedited footage of the final leg of the eggs’ journey, their arrival at WWT Slimbridge, Nige and Nicky checking the eggs, the eggs hatching…and the first SBS chicks to hatch in the UK!  

Once again, apologies for the intermittent and brief posts this week. For Nige and Nicky it has been full-on, 24 hours a day, looking after the rapidly growing chicks and checking the as-yet-unhatched eggs. So…what has been happening? Well, after the eggs arrived at Slimbridge l

This post got lost in the ether between Meinypil’gyno and Slimbridge but Phil since managed to rescue it from his hard drive when he got home. Phil writes: At Meina, Pavel and Egor had located a brood of Grey-tailed Tattlers in a survey of the mountain streams and the nest of a

A quick update to let you know that all involved (eggs, birds and team) in the project are doing well. We’ll have a proper update for you later this week with exciting news from both Russia and Gloucestershire. After this normal service will be resumed with regular updates on th

This post got lost in the ether between Meinypil’gyno and Slimbridge but Phil since managed to rescue it from his hard drive when he got home. Phil writes: Last weekend, the Heritage Cruise arrived with lots of friends on board. Evgeny & Lena Syroechkovsky with their close f

This year I was gutted at not being part of the WWT team collecting the eggs as they had inconveniently arrived on a day I had “important meetings” so it was Rebecca Lee (Senior Species Conservation Officer), Sacha Dench (Head of Media) and Paul Marshall (our Web Manager) who got the