Let's do our part to save ospreys

We lost our osprey nestling recently. With an active and seemingly robust 3-week-old a few days ago, we now have an empty nest. We watched the male, a small menhaden in its talons, wing past the nest several times, slowing and hovering as it got close, as if driven by instinct or responsibility to its young. We asked ourselves, do ospreys grieve like chimps and other animals (Jane Goodall has documented tearful grief with death in the chimp community), and are we somehow responsible?

At the College of William and Mary, I studied ospreys of the Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where we learned about their devotion to the nest (returning every year after flying hundreds of miles from Central and South America, to the same exact nest), to each other (mating for life, 20 years or more … relatives helping the nesting pair by performing an aerial dance indicating fish abundance), to their young (tending to their every need for several months, ultimately teaching their nestlings to fly, to become fledglings) to eating just fish (mostly menhaden). As my heroes, John and Frank Craighead, master naturalists and champions of bears and raptors, I came to so admire these handsome, earnest birds, these worldwide citizens. We long for them when they leave us in the fall, and so welcome their return every spring, around St. Patrick’s Day. 

Lately, especially through William and Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology, we’ve learned of recent, region-wide declines in osprey populations. On the Western Shore, those that nest on the James and Rappahannock rivers seem to have plenty of fish and their successful nests signal population stability; those on the Chesapeake Bay, where menhaden are perhaps overharvested, the low average number of nestlings per nest suggests population decline. On the other side of the bay, the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, populations have declined dramatically by nearly 90% since the 1980s. Of the four historically active nests near us here in Lewes, only the one in Cape Henlopen State Park has young. Menhaden overharvest, competition with growing bald eagle populations, water temperature increase (due to climate change) affecting the food chain are all possible culprits. 

Let’s do our best to continue to admire these beautiful, regal birds, ones so full of integrity, and let’s consider how we can take better care of them and us and all life on earth; it begins with respect and appreciation and, ultimately, response. Please consider conserving energy, supporting renewable energy (wind and solar), and recycling as best you can. Our children and theirs deserve nothing less.