Blog # 280: This July 4th Please Keep It Clean!

 This is America! Ospreys should have the same protections as eagles. Courtesy of Spiritcruises.com 

Happy Birthday America, but after the party please clean up after yourselves. The July  4th holidays are the most popular days of the year for going to the beach and the  beginning of summer beach parties and picnics. The idea is to celebrate our country  and enjoy our community, but such festivities often leave behind garbage plastic  utensils, diapers, cigarettes, fishing line, plastic bags, food wrappers, straws, beer cans,  and other lethal legacies that pollute and often severely harm or kill aquatic birds and  animals. Fireworks create more of a mess than you might imagine. Each one of the  launched rockets leaves behind paper, metal, and plastic debris that is harmful if  ingested by animals and painful if stepped on. 

A shiny foil wrapper on the surface of the water might look like lunch to a kingfisher flying above or to a hungry turtle or bass. A tangle of fishing line left stuck in shrubbery  on the shoreline can be a death trap to an oriole flying through it. Fishing line, string,  twine, plastic fencing, or six-pack holders can become lodged around necks or legs, killing mink, beavers, ducklings, and other animals. Even mylar balloons and their  ribbons threaten birds that get entangled in them.  

Birds, especially gulls and crows, often pick at garbage on the shoreline, which can  become lodged in their throats. They also bring these materials to their nests, and feed  it to their young. Ospreys tend to pick up miscellaneous items from the beach, anything  that strikes their fancy including candy wrappers, bathing suits, rubber boots, garbage  bags, string, and toys and take it back to their nests as building or restoration materials.

A toy monkey brought to the nest as a “nestoration,” along with rope, plastic tape, fishing line and other  garbage. Courtesy of WWII Home Front National Historical Park. 

Monofilament fishing line and fishing tackle, when left on the shore rather than being  recycled properly, often chokes birds or render their wings or legs useless. Hay baling  twine and plastic baling systems also present hazardous entanglements to birds that  use these materials for nest building. 

The Friends of Salt Point and the Town of Lansing Parks & Recreation Department  maintain two fishing line recycling receptacles at Salt Point and one at Myers Park,  which have been well-received by fishermen. Place your old line and tackle in there 

instead of leaving it on the shore. Twice a year the Friends of Salt Point host volunteer  days to pick up garbage and groom Salt Point. They also maintain two dog litter  disposal stations. 

Fireworks over Cayuga Lake in Lansing, courtesy of Sweet Melissa’s Ice Cream. 

Enjoy the 4th of July holiday and summer on Cayuga Lake, but please be mindful that  you share the water and shoreline with many other animals: leave no trace behind. Even better, bring out more than you brought. Pick up hazardous materials and dispose  of them properly. Better yet, join the Friends of Salt Point, the Friends of Stewart Park,  the Cayuga Watershed Network, or Discover Cayuga Lake, and donate your time to  keeping our lake, shorelines, and water clean. Thank you! 

Eyes to the sky! 

Candace 

Candace E. Cornell  

Friends of Salt Point 

Lansing, NY 

cec222@gmail.com 

ALL EYES ON OSPREYS 

WATCH! 

Salt Point Osprey Nest Cam 

READ! 

On Osprey Time 

Ospreys of Salt Point 

VISIT! 

Cayuga Lake Osprey Trail

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog #430 Is It Legal to Tear Down an Osprey Nest?

Image
  Female Osprey carrying stick to nest, courtesy of University of Montana. Nearly every spring outraged birders tell me about Osprey nests they have seen torn down by NYSEG (New York State Electric and Gas). How can this be legal? Don’t the Migratory Bird Act of 1908 (MBA) and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (MBTA) protect migratory birds, including their nests, eggs, and chicks? The 1908 law and its hundred years of treaties was the foundation of the America’s conservation legacy, that is until Trump came to town. One of his first moves was gutting the MBTA: industry benefited and the environment lost. Much of the MBTA has been reinstated, although there are still serious loopholes favoring industry by permitting "incidental takes" or animals unintentionally captured, live or dead, during industrial operations.  An Osprey nest is considered active if it contains viable eggs and/or chicks. A nest becomes active when the first egg is laid and remains active until fledged
Read more

Blog #397 Halfway Mark: Three Weeks

Image
  On Osprey Time On Osprey Time just moved to blogger.com. Pardon the delay in posting.  Please bookmark! A mother feeding her 3.5-week-old offspring, courtesy of Cynthia Sedlacek.   Three and a half weeks into the nestling period, the three chicks have grown halfway to their adult size with Moana, the eldest, weighing just shy of a pound. Full-grown adult males usually weigh 2 pounds and females can be up to 4.4 pounds. Sleeping through most of the day and all night, the pile of offspring springs to life whenever their father, Orpheus, brings a fish to the nest. When awake, the nestlings waddle around the nest with their enormous feet, defecating over the nest edge, and peering over the rim at the people below. They are starting to use their wings for balance and rock forward on them to get a good stretch. When it’s mealtime, the eager chicks make their way across the nest to get fed by their mother Ursula.   Once their crops (storage organs; see second photo below) are full of food,
Read more

Blog #461 Sneak Peek at Osprey Season 2024

Image
  Orpheus (L) and Ursula at their Salt Point Nest March 26, courtesy of Cindy Sedlacek. The following is a sneak peek at what this Osprey summer will entail. Our northeastern Ospreys return to their breeding habitats just after the early spring thaw. This year’s first Osprey was seen in Cayuga Lake Basin on March 15, an early date many attribute to  the mild winter. Most nest occupants will have returned to their nests and reunited with their mates by this weekend. These returning Ospreys have just completed their 2,000–4,000-mile migrations from their wintering areas along the coasts of South America and in the wild Amazonian tropics. The range of landscapes that a cosmopolitan Osprey can experience in its lifetime is staggering. In general, the older breeding males arrive on their nests followed by their mates in a few days. After that first wave of older Ospreys arrive, unmated adults and second-year birds migrating north for the first time after spending two years in the South, wil
Read more