This is the sad story of one of our first satellite tracked chicks who became known as No11 because he was fitted with a white colour ring on his right foot, with black number 11 on it.

• Starting off as an egg laid in April 2010 No11 had a health check in July 2010 when he was fitted with a satellite tracker so that we could learn about where our Osprey chicks fly to after they leave Cumbria.
• On the 24th August No11 flies south stopping off north of Birmingham.
• By the 29th August No11 was in Portugal and stayed there a few days and enjoying looking for fish in the warm estuary on the 2nd September.
• By early September No11 was in the heat of the Western Sahara in Dahkla National Park.
• In October No11 was sharing the same desert with his brother No12.
• December saw No11 continue to explore the region with trips into Senegal and Mauritania.
• New Years day and No11 is enjoying the beach life.
• However on the 11th January we realised something was wrong as we had not received his satellite signal for 10 days.

Over the next few months we kept getting a feint signal from a remote area of Nouakchott in Mauritania just off the N2 road between Nouakchott and St Louis.

Our friends from the Rutland Osprey Project flew out to Senegal in January to look for Ospreys and even spotted one of our 2007 chicks white/black ring YU but could not get access into Mauritania to look for No11.

Still determined to find out what had happened to No11 our team continued to try and make contact with someone in Mauritania who could visit the site where we kept getting a feint signal from.

In March 2011, thanks to Dr Mohamed Abdellahi Ould Babah (Director-General of the Centre National de Lutte Antiacridienne (CNLA in Nouakchott), Wim Mullié (co-author of the recent Birds of Mauritania ) and Joost Brouwer (secretary to the council of the West African Ornithological Society) the remains of No11 were finally found.

The remains of No11 were found in the loft space of an isolated building, buried in rubbish. The building and compound where it was found is used by people from Nouakchott as a summering area for their stock. As the tracker was not exposed to the sun its solar powered bateries were not being recharched which is why we had lost the signal, but we knew its last location was this buildng. The picture shows the remains of No11 with the ring and satellite tracker clearly visible. Thanks to our new African friends we have recieved the tracker back to use again this year.

The circumstances of his death are not clear but unfortunately his story comes to an end in the heat of the Sahara Desert.

We are very grateful to the West African Ornithological Society for their help in finding No11. Have a look at their web site to find out more about their work and the birds of West Africa.