On Osprey Time

Orpheus sitting in a cottonwood showing a “bloody stump,” courtesy of Karel and Cindy Sedlacek. I arrived at Salt Point this noon after reports of Ospreys in the neighborhood. Upon  arrival we found a battle-weary Orpheus sitting one-legged in tree on the Salt Point side of Salmon Creek. Two tender-hearted bird-watchers and friends, who had been  watching the bird for hours, were upset. They had the Osprey in their scope and it  looked like he had a ragged “bloody stump.” Earlier, they had seen the Osprey skirmish  with an adult bald eagle by the Salmon Creek railroad bridge. Could an eagle rip an  Osprey’s leg off? This was a terrible image having watched Orpheus for over 8 years.  Bald Eagles are twice as heavy and have twice the wingspan of an Osprey. That  translates into tremendous power. If an Osprey talon was stuck in a fish bone and an  eagle pulled the fish in the opposite direction, is it possible for the osprey foot to tear?  The l...

It broke my heart to see the old stick Osprey nests on Rt. 5 & 20 torn down and replaced by nesting disks—non-conductive saucers with drain holes in them. A few of the destroyed Osprey nests had been used for nearly two decades and the eldest was already occupied this spring by a male. I watched him add sticks to the nest for over an hour last Sunday. The next day—Monday—he was gone, along with his nearly 3ft-high  nest.   Osprey pair nest in FiberNest, courtesy of FiberNest.  These high tension powerlines stretching across NY, MA, and RI are owned by the  National Grid, and they are disk crazy! In addition to "improving" the Osprey nests along  Rt. 5 & 20 crossing the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, National Grid also took  down 6–7 more nests running along the Seneca River on the Rivers Crossing  Campground property, replacing them with these disks. The campground owner said  that three of the disks have nests in them. I’ll chec...

Tired Osprey returns from spring migration, courtesy of Andy Morffew.  Ospreys are arriving at their nests in the Cayuga Lake Basin, looking ragged, hungry,  and exhausted—and they should. The birds have just completed a rugged northward  marathon migration flying thousands of miles nearly nonstop into storms, high winds,  and through hazardous situations.   Osprey, flying north from South America (see map below), make long-distance  overwater crossings of 400-700 miles across the Gulf of Venezuela before resting briefly in Haiti, Jamaica, or Cuba. This tiring flight typically takes 25–40 hours and  involves risky nighttime travel. The birds travel as much as 5,000 miles from the  Amazon basin, across the Caribbean past Cuba and the Florida keys, and up the  Atlantic Coast before they end up at their breeding sites, which can be as far as  northern Canada. This is an incredible winged migration that normally takes two to three ...