August 17, 2005
This is Home
As we reported yesterday, right before the thunderstorm on Tuesday afternoon, we saw our youngest take its first seemingly intentional flight and successfully return to the nest not long after. It was a very good sign because it looked like it was a more controlled and deliberate flying attempt than the chick's effort several days ago. Hopefully as the youngest gains confidence, the flights will become more numerous.
But both chicks are now fully capable fledglings, and in the coming weeks they will not only work on improving their flying skills -- learning to bank, to skim, to hover -- but they will also learn to do something else very important -- memorize their home area.
In his excellent book Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder, author David Gessner, who spent a summer observing ospreys in the Cape Cod area, offers these thoughts on the early flying days of the young ospreys:
"If instinct gives them the final push over the nest edge and into the sky, now comes the time when learning hones instinct. Each adjustment of their primary feathers, each bank and each glide, is new, and must be mastered...As well as learning to use their wings and bodies, during these midsummer weeks the young ospreys first begin to get to know their places. The local geography is imprinting itself on the developing osprey mind, and the fledglings spend these first weeks of flight learning the particulars of their home ground...One way of looking at what is going on out on the marshes is that the young birds are committing their neighborhoods to memory, so much so that when they fly back from South America two springs from now they will know just where to build. Now is the time the attachment grows, an attachment that will lead to an unerring pull to return, an instinct for home that is almost beyond human comprehension."
And so the young ospreys will venture forth to improve their flying and hunting skills, but also to imprint on their minds all that is Blackwater Refuge, so when the time comes to return from the southern wintering grounds, the fledglings will know that this is home.
Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
