Gone

The accumulating nesting failures this year are continuing. Below is a photo from last year of a nest built in a dead snag in a marshy area. About a week ago that nest held two beautiful chicks....and yesterday when I visited this nest it was gone and the chicks perished. This is the challenging life of an Osprey, but it still breaks my heart. ( in fact I pulled over on the side of the road and let out a few swear words.) I had so recently watched those sweet chicks with such joy. All the heavy rains and storms must have collapsed the nest. This was one of very few nests in a tree that we have documented in this study. This also points to why the increasing nest attempts on cell towers and ballfield lights are actually a smart adaptation for the ospreys since those structures do not fall. Many nests have failed for many different reasons this year. I am still trying to decipher the unifying factors in all these failures, if there are any. My cursory count of nest failures so far is 46. And this is still early July, with more failures possible. We had 40 failures last year and 37 the year before. To me this is a growing to a startling number. It’s curious that so many of the failures are clustered together and nests in other areas are successful. Many of our chicks are a little younger than they usually are by early July, but still a delight to watch the little guys motoring around the nest. Some of the older ones now are almost fully feathered, while some recently hatched chicks have not even been seen and counted yet! What a weird year.