A rare species

You would have thought that ospreys would have learned to build nests by now. But as a young conservationist working in the north of Scotland in the early 1970s, Roy Dennis made a crucial discovery: they’re a bit rubbish at it. Or some ospreys are – young ones especially.

“We noticed that they were building poor nests in poorly chosen trees, and then they started breeding and the nest was blown down,” Dennis, now in his 80s, tells me on a Zoom call from his home in the Findhorn Valley in north-east Scotland. “We just thought, this is stupid – we can build better nests than that.”

And so they did. The story illustrates both Dennis’s can-do attitude and his acute naturalist’s perception. These two qualities have made him the driving force behind some of the