Interesting….

 Another challenging week in the osprey world here. We are discovering quite a few losses on the nests….three chick nests now have two, two chick nests now have one. The single Mom who was raising three chicks as of last sunday, now only has two. One was smaller than the other two, and now that wee one is gone. This morning I have been watching the Arb cam with growing concern. The male has always delivered a fish at about 5:30 a.m. and he has not been seen since about 6 p.m. last night. The female is clearly looking for him. Will she be smart enough to go get a fish? I have a knot in my stomach.

Another unusual observation at the nest with the single mom occurred yesterday. While her mate has been in rehab, another unbanded male has been seen often. She always reacted to him as an intruder, not allowing him to land on the nest, chirping at him. Yesterday she allowed him to land on the nest with a fish….she made no aggressive moves. He sat on the corner of the nest eating the head off the fish, and then she went over and grabbed the fish, and he let her! Then he flew off and she fed the remaining two chicks. It’s unusual in this circumstance for her to allow another male on the nest. In my 30 years of studying ospreys I have seen this happen once before. And it’s unusual for a male to deliver a fish to a nest where he knows he is not the father of those chicks. There is no biological incentive. But the one time I observed this, many years ago….that male would not feed the chicks or deliver fish to them….but was just delivering a fish to the female as part of a courtship behavior….and he cemented his spot on that nest for the following year. He rescued a damsel in distress to gain a territory.

Ahhh the male at the Arb did show up two hours later than usual with a fish, so all is well there!