Good news/bad news…

 Well it’s a good news /bad news kind of day. First the bad news…..overnight two of the arboretum cam nest eggs ended up out of the nest cup. I don’t know how the first one got out there….but it looked cracked to me and may have been unfertilized. Later in the day it got stepped on and cracked further into small pieces ( seen above the female in the first photo). The second egg ended up in the lower left corner very suddenly and I watched the video over and over to figure it out….i think when the male came with a fish, and the female got up to get it, the egg may have been stuck to her belly feathers…and then it dropped off where she was standing with the fish. It remains there. The nest cup looks wet and muddy, so that may explain why it stuck to her. It’s sad, but we hope the remaining egg will be ok. So the first photo is of the Arb cam nest. Other photos from another nest.

The good news….our two first nests have begun hatching! I was at one nest this morning while it was still foggy and drizzling….and only 43 degrees. The male was sticking very close by….and he would only leave to get more nest material. Sadly some of it was landscape fabric. I wish people would be more careful with what they leave laying on the ground. When the female got up to look beneath, the male stood next to her and stared into the nest cup. Sweet. Then when she settled back into incubation / brooding, he snuggled down right next to her! He was not sitting on eggs, but he was giving her moral support! This is our oldest banded male now….20 years old! Ya gotta love this guys attentiveness, and care. The photos are horrible but maybe you can make out two heads in one image and then another one where they are both staring down into the nest.

Then I went on to another nest where the adults were pretty darn interested in what was happening in the nest cup! I did not see a feeding yet….but I know these touching signs that something special is happening!

May 19, 2025…

 There is a lot going on behind the scenes as we try to deal with some issues….dangerous situations for ospreys that need to be addressed. It takes time to evaluate situations and behaviors, decide what would be best for the birds, and contact proper authorities for help. We have already found ten new nests! I am trying to identify (banded or not banded) all birds, and read the bands that I have found. It takes a lot of time. And tomorrow the window opens for our earliest nests to begin hatching….

It’s fun when I find new young birds that are offspring of some of our older, banded birds! So many generations of ospreys!
I am also still searching for some birds who had their nests removed and were seen briefly….but where did they go?
I hope my readers will let me know if new nests pop up….keep your eyes on cell towers, power lines, ballfield lights.
As the population grows we also need more nest monitors….so If you have a spotting scope, are able to commit to checking one or more nests weekly, and would like to get involved, please shoot me an email at osprey.mn@gmail.com. We have a list of guidelines to direct your observations as we try to collect the same data on all nests.
We are already seeing some potential problems, failures. I was watching a nest that had two adults a few weeks ago, but last weekend I watched for many hours and never saw the male. This weekend again, I saw no male and the female left the nest to get a fish and she wolfed it down perched on the nest edge before she hopped back into the nest to resume incubation. This doesn’t look good. On another nest we have a female incubating, but we don’t ever see a male helping her. We believe this might be a situation where one male was attending two nests, but since eggs have been laid, he is primarily attending to only one nest. This is often the outcome of these polygynous situations. One nest will be the primary nest and will get most of the males attention and eventually the other nest will fail. We are trying to document this, but a male that is rarely there, can be very hard to identify! I am wondering if the nest where the female left to get her own fish may be in the same situation. Does her “mate” have another nest? I run back and forth and spend hours trying to identify these males to confirm my suspicions. If males are banded, we can prove what is occurring, but if they aren’t banded, it can be more difficult.
We are continuing to see the population develop into loose colonies….ospreys attract other ospreys, so new nests pop up between two other nests! And the closeness of nests can provide more opportunities for males to spread their DNA! It’s just instinct, folks! We must remember that the two driving forces of these birds is to survive, and to reproduce!
I am sure we will be announcing our first hatches very soon!

Three eggs at the Arb.

 We have three eggs on the Arboretum cam Nest! The clutch is probably complete. It was laid overnight….shortly after midnight I could still see only two eggs but early this morning, just before 6 am, I see three…so in the wee hours of May 10 she laid the third egg.

First egg at the Arb cam nest…

 The first egg arrived at the Arboretum Cam nest today….about 10:05. If you can roll back the video to about 10 a.m. today (May 4) you can watch her “in labor”. Then it was pretty cute when the male came and was trying to peek under her to see it!