We are honored to have Alan Poole writing our first guest column. Alan spent over ten years studying ospreys in Southern New England and Florida (Florida Bay) and the result was his indispensable book, Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History (Cambridge U. Press; 1989). This book, which sparked my own interest in ospreys, is must reading for anyone interested in the birds. Alan continues to keep a close watch on the 80 or so pair of ospreys that nest along the Westport River in Westport, MA. He is based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where he edits the Birds of North America, an online publication that covers the life-histories of North America's breeding birds.

"This Famed Bird" by Alan Poole

Kudos to David Gessner for launching OspreyWorld.  It’s a tribute to Dave’s energy and enthusiasm, to the power of the Internet, and of course to the broad, magnetic appeal of this extraordinary bird. The tribe of people interested in Ospreys is pleasingly diverse, and worldwide in scope. What better way to engage them, to share ideas and information, than this site.  I look forward to seeing it grow. 

 “The habits of this famed bird differ so materially from those of almost all others of its tribe, that an accurate description of them cannot fail to be interesting to the student of nature.”  So wrote John James Audubon over 150 years ago in Birds of America. He had the pleasure of seeing Ospreys nesting in primeval American wilderness – while he was floating the Mississippi by barge, sailing the Florida coast, riding weeks on end through towering eastern forests.  Reading him we weep for what’s been lost. But we haven’t lost Ospreys, a blessedly adaptable beast, and we do have an advantage over Audubon; thanks to research, publishing, and the Internet, we know a lot more about this bird than he did. And this knowledge opens doors to a bigger world. 

For me, this is one of the great pleasures of having caught the Osprey bug.  I may be physically tied to a small town in upstate New York, and to a comfortably stable Osprey breeding population in coastal southeast Massachusetts, but discovering (and rediscovering) Ospreys has taken me around the globe, even if only as an armchair observer. 

Looking through a scientific lens, an astonishing amount of research has been focused on this bird in recent years. A quick Internet search shows me >150 papers on Ospreys just since 2000, with work from 6 of the 7 continents.  So trying to summarize the “State of the Union” for global Ospreys in 2007 is a daunting task. There do seem to be some trends and highlights worth noting, however:

Overall, Ospreys are booming -- maybe not quite on the scale of kudzu or phragmites or Toyota, but if they were a stock on the New York Exchange, they’d be a “buy.” In North America alone, breeding populations have climbed back from lows of the pesticide years (1950s and 60s) to near record numbers, close to 20,000 breeding pairs according to recent (2002) estimates in the US, and at least half that number in Canada, probably more.  In 1981 there were 17 US states with no breeding Ospreys; now there are just 4, so it’s a dynamic bird we are dealing with here, as well as a prolific one. Same story, to a lesser degree, in Europe, where Ospreys have re-colonized central France in the past 2-3 decades (20+ pairs now, including one within the city limits of Paris – Vive le balbuzard pecheur!), and have begun (more slowly) to colonize Belgium and the Netherlands. In Poland, Germany and Eastern Europe, populations are stable or growing slowly, with a similar pattern in Finland and Scandinavia, perhaps held back by lack of nest sites or by a scarcity of fish-rich bodies of water. In Scotland, by contrast, Ospreys have gone from a few to more than 160 breeding pairs in the past 50 years, an astounding success owing in large part to help from their friends (people building artificial nest sites, moving fledglings to new sites, guarding nests in some vulnerable locations). From there, breeders have begun moving south, colonizing parts of Britain as well.  Russia is a big unknown, vast and tough to census. Asia too, with the exception of Japan where a small but stable coastal nesting population (a few dozen pairs) seems to be holding its own.   

The Mediterranean and the Middle East show a different picture, probably the most troubled spot for Ospreys, with many local populations hanging on by a thread.  We know most about the Baleric Islands, and islands in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea (the latter a good reminder that conservation languishes without political stability).  Similarly, Ospreys appear to be vulnerable off the west coast of Africa, where remnant populations nest on the Cape Verde and Canary islands. In some of these areas, researchers suspect a few Ospreys may end up in the pot. We’re not in Florida any more. 

Determining how to keep Osprey populations productive and growing, biologists face a number of questions that keep them up at night.  For starters, many US populations are growing slower than they did 10, 20, 30 years ago. Is their habitat saturated? And if so what parts? In other words, what puts the lid on Osprey numbers: nest sites, food availability, pesticides, something we haven’t thought about? We don’t know for sure, and the answer is likely to vary among regions, even on a local scale. But we do know that Ospreys are a whole lot “cleaner” than they were 30-50 years ago, at least most of them. Contaminants probably aren’t slowing them down much.  If you were starving and had to eat Ospreys for a while (Lord forbid!), odds are good you’d survive just fine, and your future kids would be born none the worse for it.  Surely this is one of the clearest messages Ospreys have to tell us today: they’ve survived the pesticides era, and we have too; we live now with cleaner waters, cleaner fish.  Not perfectly clean, and there are some trouble spots, but all in all a whole lot better off than we were 50 years ago. Thank Rachael Carson, and thank Ospreys.  After all, their story was part of the message used in court to block continued use of DDT in the US. 

Standing back to look at Ospreys globally, there’s another striking aspect to this bird: how many now nest on structures built by humans: towers, buoys, power poles, duck-hunting blinds, “Osprey poles,” topped trees…..  Along the east coast of the US, more than 90% use such structures; in Baja and parts of Sonoran Mexico, greater than 50%; in Finland, almost half; in Majorca, many; in Scotland, most.  Bottom line: like it or not, we’ve created Osprey populations that are dependent on us.  Most of the artificial nest sites Ospreys now use require at least occasional maintenance; some put Ospreys at risk (power poles); many aren’t adequate or are poorly sited, causing nest failure. So this dependence comes at a price. It’s fine when you are an Osprey living in Scotland or New England, where birdwatchers outnumber Ospreys by at least 1000 to 1, and where conservation groups spend weeks each winter planning how and where to site new osprey nests, how to fix old ones, and how to guard them all once the birds arrive.  Probably tougher to be an Osprey along the coast of Morocco or Mexico or Saudi Arabia, where concerned humans with the time and money to attend to nests are a lot sparser.  We need to get smarter and better organized about these efforts, focusing help on areas where the need is greatest.

No use having a good nest if you can’t find fish – a likely Osprey mantra if ever there was one. Feeding 2-3 ravenous young for weeks on end requires a dependable supply, and it’s this piece of the Osprey reproductive equation we know the least about.  It’s a key piece.  We know that prolonged rain and wind storms kill young in the nest, but whether from exposure or starvation (or both) is still not clear. We know that fishing birds adjust their foraging methods to moderate wind, and to sun and clouds.  We know a little about where nesting birds go to fish, and how adaptable they are, but not nearly enough. And we have a pretty good idea (for a few populations) of what kind of fish they choose, and how successful they are at catching them.  But we have little idea how the availability of preferred fish has changed over time, and how human fisheries have affected such shifts.  Let’s face it, humans have put enormous pressure on fish populations in recent decades, and Ospreys are sure to have been impacted. We have hints of Osprey setbacks in a few areas – birds traveling far for fish and taking too long to find them -- but we really need to know more. 

Arguably the biggest news coming from the Osprey front in recent years concerns migration.  Satellite transmitters have opened big new windows here, and the view is exciting.  Thanks to work in the US and Finland/Sweden and Britain, we’re now are able to track Ospreys individually, day by day, as they fly south to wintering grounds in Africa and South America, and back.  Those of you who have missed this story can check the following sites (http://www.bioweb.uncc.edu/bierregaard/ospreys.htm; http://www.ospreys.org.uk/Satellite.htm); what’s impressive here is both the consistency of tracks followed by birds from certain regions, and how individual they are at the same time.  90% of the breeders from the northeastern US appear to migrate south through Florida, Cuba, and Haiti to northern South America, but some take 50 days, some 20.  Some follow a coastal US route, some go inland; some go deep into South America for winter, and move around a lot; some stop at the coast as soon as they get there and hardly move at all for months.  A few go no farther than Florida.   Similar patterns are seen for European Ospreys going to Africa.  There’s still a lot we don’t know about Ospreys, but it’s increasingly clear they’re as individual as we are. 

Nothing shows how vibrant and dynamic the world of Osprey studies is right now than a quick look at the scientific literature.  I’ll end this ramble with a few Osprey highlights gleaned from the Internet, some big, some small – but all worth noting.  This is perhaps a precursor to an “Occasional Update” on this site that tracks key findings in the world of Ospreys.  Stay tuned, and Thanks for interest.

HIGHLIGHTS:

-Young entangled in hay-bale twine at nests in Saskatchewan

-Spring arrival dates at lakes in Sweden have advanced by 20 days over the past 50 years; who says there’s no global warming…??

-Genetic studies indicate that 3 of 4 Osprey subspecies appear to represent distinct species – farther apart than we’ve realized….

-A survey of birds of prey and owls on the island of Bawean, in the Java Sea, adds Osprey as a new breeding species.

-Ospreys as part of the breeding avifauna of the Umm al-Qamari Islands protected area, Saudi Arabia.

-Ospreys fall migration numbers at a new raptor monitoring site in the Florida Keys.

-Holocene fossil records of Ospreys in Central Europe, in the past 10,000 years – suggests renewed immigration around 10,000 yr BP, probably post-glaciation; with fluctuating numbers thereafter, perhaps caused by human persecution.

-Evidence for nocturnal migration, US and Europe.

-Breeding biology on the north coast of NS Wales, Australia.

-Breeding record on Uttchima Islet in the Uji Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture Japan

-Success of Ospreys nesting on natural and artificial structures in the Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, 1991-2001

-First record of Osprey nesting near Paris!