Busy busy!

 Well I am up to my eyeballs this time of year….still working my way around to over 180 nests for the first time, reading bands, even the silver ones ( ooof) , and figuring out what is going on at each nest. We have some chronically late birds that leave an opening for other birds to either take over their nests, or copulate with their mate. But in the end, the territorial birds usually win back their nest. We documented this so many years ago, observing so many extra pair copulations, refuting the myth that ospreys mate for life. It’s a game of musical nests every spring, tho most long time mated pairs do end up back in their territory, if they survived migration. Not all do survive. It looks like our oldest male, who would have been 22 this year, did not make it back to his territory. It makes me very sad. And tho I thought we had lost other banded birds, many of them have shown up. But I have to warn the nest monitors to keep looking at legs for bands, even if the first birds seen were unbanded, new birds! Things do change quite often.

I have had fun running into long time monitors and property owners that I haven’t seen recently….I love to connect with the people who support this project in various ways. It’s so much fun to spend some time watching ospreys with the monitors….and getting to interpret behaviors, vocalizations etc. After all these years of observing ospreys, I do have different perspectives on what’s going on!

We are seeing a pair at the Arboretum Cam nest….they seem to be a totally new unbanded pair, so we have no info about them. They are behaving like young birds, so we will see what happens.

I thought you would be interested in seeing these HUGE nests….ospreys work so hard to build and rebuild their nests, and I love it when humans leave them in place. So many nests were removed this year, sigh….leaving ospreys scrambling to rebuild somewhere.

And I am deeply grateful for those who make financial donations to support this big effort. I couldnt do this without a lot of different kinds of help.