Wishing all the osprey people around the world a Merry Chrismas, Happy Solstice, Happy New Year…..may your holidays be peaceful and healthy. A special message of gratitude to all the people in Minnesota who have helped me with our ongoing project here…each and everyone of you is so appreciated and important. Let kindness and care for our planet and all living creatures guide us thru the New Year….
There may be people on this page who have never heard the name Missy Patty. Missy passed away in early December, at 88 years of age and I want to tell you a bit about her. I met Missy when we were both hack site attendants on the Osprey reintroduction effort here in Minnesota. She was leading the effort over on the east side of the metro, running the hack site in North Oaks and at Lake Vadnais, when I worked at the hack site at Medicine lake on the west side of the metro. When The Raptor Center had two permanently disabled Ospreys they wanted to train as education birds, Missy helped me with that….fist training and feeding these two totally different birds. We had many discussions about osprey behavior and how to achieve our goals with those ospreys. Missy also helped with banding young Ospreys for many years. In more recent years her attentions turned more towards her family and I didnt run into her when I was out monitoring osprey nests in her neck of the woods. I just wanted to use this space to acknowledge the many contributions she made to growing this population of ospreys, the knowledge she shared, and to say how sad I am to hear of her passing. She never read this page and her family probably doesnt either….but she was an important person in the Osprey world in Minnesota and I thank her for all she gave to help establish this population of Ospreys. May she rest in peace, and fly free….Thanks Missy.
Carol Christians and I got the last predator guard up today….after the big snow dump! Many thanks to Carol for her help getting several predator guards up this week and the donation! So appreciated!
A big thanks to Mike Chlan at Minnesota Valley Electric Coop for helping us add a perch today to the nestpole that they errected last winter to accomodate some ospreys that had been nesting on a substation power pole. As many of you know, having a perch for the adults is an important part of nest construction. In this case I watched the adults flying across the road and dipping low over a busy road all summer and knew we had to give them a place to perch nearer to their youngsters, and to give those chicks a place to fly back to when making their early, experimental flights. I am so grateful to Mike and MVEC for their great work in helping these ospreys!
Our 2021 osprey season has officially come to an end. The last juvenile and parent I was watching left between Oct 2 and 6. Oh how we will miss them.
A dreary, drizzly day here in Minnesota, but I went out this morning to check on that last remaining juvenile that I observed last wednesday. Still there! The chick was on the nest perch with a fish….but I heard an osprey so looked around, and the adult male was divebombing a mature bald eagle and a juvenile bald eagle perched in a tree not too far from the Osprey nest. He did his best to try to dislodge them, but they wouldnt budge so he gave up. I hope he stayed nearby to watch over his youngster as she ate.
