1/8/2024 0 Comments Osprey half wing fan![]() Nests are so sturdily made that osprey couples return to the same one every season. The osprey adults arrived in March, from wintering grounds in South America. In mid-June, the young have the disheveled look of newly hatched birds and are smaller than mom and dad. I am rewarded a few days later when I see one, then two, then three heads peek over the edge of the home-team nest. I will remain loyal to my home team of osprey, those at Anne Arundel Community College, and check in on them on a regular basis. Activity suits my personality better than waiting and watching. So I decide to leave the detailed osprey observations to Gessner and the ranks of ospreyologists before him - Alan Poole, Pete Dunne, John Hay, to name a few - instead using this opportunity to explore the Chesapeake, going searching for active nests up and down the Bay. I like this notion and vow to try it, but summer time invades my osprey time, and swimming, camping, entertaining and the like get in my way. In Return of the Osprey, Gessner describes the same struggle, of coming to terms with the discipline of staying still. At least when measured according to human standards of activity. Sometimes watching nature is incredibly uneventful. My thoughts turn to observing plankton under a laboratory microscope in my office as a graduate student at the University of Maine. Now I am reminded of why I didnt become a research scientist. I see a pair of osprey sitting on a nest. Leaping from the car, I take binoculars, pad and pen to record my exciting discoveries. Before I even hit water, half a mile from my house, theres an osprey nest on one of the stadium lights at Anne Arundel Community College. I pack up sunscreen, binoculars, my baseball cap and a notepad and go in search of an active osprey nest. I come to this assignment as a trained scientist, a birdwatcher, a nature lover, a person comfortable out of doors. My story began in May, when an e-mail appeared on my computer screen, an assignment from my editor to discover osprey on Chesapeake Bay. Of course, I fell in love with osprey, too. And in my own osprey research I discovered some beautiful Bay places and remarkable people who make their home and living on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Reading Gessners book, I learned a lot about the lives of osprey, and even more about life itself. Its a story first told by David Gessner in his recently published Return of the Osprey, about the ospreys re-establishment near his home on Cape Cod. How I came to be aware of them and cannot now shake them from my awareness is a story richly woven with human and animal nature. Why they nearly disappeared and how they made their comeback make for a nature story with a happy ending. Now about 3,000 osprey pairs nest along Maryland and Virginia shores, making this region one of the worlds largest in osprey concentration. Second, before the ban of DDT in 1972, osprey had all but disappeared from the shores of the Bay. First, this is my second summer near Chesapeake Bay, but I hardly noticed them before I started actively looking. This simple statement is remarkable for two reasons. Stand still long enough, and you may become an osprey nest. Youll find osprey nests on channel markers, utility poles, billboards and radio towers.
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