The Osprey
The cold winter winds on Cape Cod were slowly giving way to the warmer breeze starting to arrive in this year of 2009. As the weather started to warm it would soon be time for me to start making some visits to a series of marshes that bring the Fish Hawk or Osprey to their nesting areas.
For the past two years I have been checking on eight to twelve nests for the Audubon here on the Cape and after doing eagles for many years for the New York State Endangered Species Unit I thought I would be disappointed. I was wrong.
As the birds started to arrive at their nesting grounds the nest improvement started to go into high gear. I soon learned the Osprey has a eye for some items that are bright in color and seems it loved all kinds of rope which I have to think comes from fishing boats when no one is around. They are a pleasure to watch and work very hard at this time of nest repair.
With the nests I monitor, I decided to write about this one pair of birds that have really caught my eye and a bit of my soul also. I have been watching them now for three years. Their first nesting, they had a nest on a Power Company pole and had been causing some power troubles to some very expensive homes. Here is the original nest located on the Power Company’s pole. As you can see, there were some problems.
On this pile of sticks forty feet high this pair fledged triplets from this location and after nesting was over the Power Company took the nest down and placed a new forty foot pole about fifty feet from it with a fine platform. The birds arrived the next spring and they took right to it. (A tip of my Delaware Raptor hat went to the Power Company). Here is a look at the old and new.
Now as you can see the birds are using the old nest pole for a short flight and some interaction between two of them as one has a fish.
The nest sits on a hill looking out onto Buzzards Bay in North Falmouth at Nye’s Neck, a beautiful private beach with a bay full of stripe bass.
This made it a bit easier for the male with his job of keeping a nest full of young fed and a happy mate. He is quite the fisherman and as you can see in the photo of him below with a good size stripe bass and taking his share on the old nest pole before flying over the fifty or so feet to the nest of very vocal young.
When I first started watching this nest for the 2009 nesting season I had trouble seeing into the nest but could tell when the female was incubating so I had a rough idea when to start looking for heads.
I left them alone for about three weeks and I covered some other nests. On my return, still nothing to see so another three weeks I let them be. On my next visit, I had my scope set on my wagon and I saw a small head popping up and down. I set a large lens on a tripod and with a remote shutter release I watched in the scope and operated the camera in hopes of catching something I did not see in the scope. When getting to my computer that night I could see I had two young heads sticking up and was pleased.
As the weeks went by the young grew fast, on a visit on July 10, I saw the young very clear, and I took many photos. That night at home, as I downloaded my camera files I saw I had some nice photos.
My son had dropped in. I was showing him the day’s photos in a slide show and all of a sudden, he said stop. I stopped and we both were looking at this one photo and I could not believe what I saw, there in plain sight were four young. I could not believe I could miss three yet there were four all along and feeding by Mom.
We both looked at each other and laughed.
The rest of the nesting of this nest was just a fun filled adventure for me. Every day I watched this family I got some good laugh’s and best of all I was there when the last of the young made her first flight on July 29th. I gave her a big handclap when she returned to the nest.
The flight I posted at the link below.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/loub/sets/72157621905276424/
Some facts I learned about the Osprey by watching for many hours is the Female can be identified by a specked like necklace on her breast and she (like most raptors) is the boss at nesting time. Also I found they are the only raptors that have special talons and I quote my search on them
“Quote”
Feet: An osprey's feet -- the main fishing tool -- are covered with scales on the top and spines (called spicules) on the bottom that, along with the sharp talons, help the osprey grip slippery prey. Osprey talons are curved like fishhooks, and the birds have an added feature of a reversible toe that allows them to have two toes forward and two toes back for better gripping. Osprey talons will reflexively snap closed when they come in contact with prey, and biologists report that the talons can snap shut faster than a human eye can blink. In addition, these talons allow the osprey to turn the fish so that the aerodynamic head of the fish is facing forward.
An amazing bird the Osprey is. A fish in each talon.
o