Wonderful news: Flamme (KF6) has been spotted, for the first time since being released in 2017, by Chris Wood and Joanna Dailey in The Gambia on March 2! Born to a family of three chicks in southern Norway, he weighed in at 1480g just before release. Which made us believe that Flamme was probably a male since they usually weigh less than 1.5kg, while females are generally heavier. The results of a DNA analysis to determine the sex of this bird unfortunately turned out to be inconclusive.

So is Flamme a boy or a girl? From the nice photos taken by Chris and Joanna, the jury is still out. While his wide, dark bib is more typically female, at times males can also have one. A photo showing a fairly pale underwing and a relatively small head suggests that the bird could be male. This question is relevant since males are more philopatric than females. So if Flamme is a male and safely returns from migration, the probability would be higher that we may see him again in Switzerland in the coming few weeks or months.

It is anyway extraordinary that Flamme is the third Osprey from the Swiss project to be discovered in sub-Saharan Africa wintering grounds, after a male from 2016 was photographed (with his blue ring just illegible) in Senegal in December of that year, and then Fusée (PR9), another male from 2016, was identified four times in that same country during the winter of 2018-19.