August 24, 2005
Ospreys & Fishing Line
Nest Update: In the last few days, the father osprey has been making very stealthy drops of fish for the young fledglings. If you aren't watching the cam at just the right moment, you might miss him. And sometimes he drops the fish off so quickly, the cam can't even catch him -- suddenly there's just a fish in the nest, like magic.
But it's clear our father osprey has been picking up the pace of food deliveries lately (did the mother osprey have anything to do with that?), so Lightning has been getting more fish. On several occasions, Lightning has been the first chick to get to the meal, and when that happens, Thunder lets him feed for a while, but then she reasserts her oldest-and-biggest-chick rights and takes the fish remains away from Lightning.
On one occasion when this happened, Thunder showed us a classic mantling posture -- wings spread, tail fanned, head down -- hiding the fish from Lightning. But Lightning's memory isn't that short -- he knew he was just eating a fish, and he also knows he's often going to lose any sibling altercations over food.
While we're on the topic of fish, one of the main reasons that ospreys, eagles, and waterfowl visit our Chesapeake Bay area is because of the large fish populations that swim in our shallow Bay and its many tributaries; and this also brings many anglers to the Bay. Unfortunately human fishing activity has the potential to interfere with successful osprey nesting -- but not in the way that you might think.
Ospreys have a dangerous habit of bringing almost anything to their nests. Several well-known osprey observers have reported seeing osprey nests that contained toy boats, hula hoops, bicycle tires, and even a Barbie doll (according to author David Gessner). To see one example, click on this thumbnail photo to get a close-up view of a Long Island, New York nest that contains a miscellaneous assortment of cord, rope, and plastic mesh that these osprey parents felt would make good nesting material.
Unfortunately this lack of discrimination in nesting material sometimes puts the osprey families in danger because in the Chesapeake Bay area, discarded fishing gear is abundant.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Chesapeake Bay Field Office has been trying to publicize the problem of discarded fishing lines, hooks, and six-pack plastic rings. The biologists have found that during annual osprey surveys in the greater Bay area, at least 5-10% of osprey nests contained fishing line. In addition, a 2003 survey on the local Patuxent River revealed that more than half the osprey nests contained fishing line, as well as other man-made materials. As a result, biologists found ospreys with entangled legs, beaks and wings. On some occasions, the material even led to the starvation or strangulation of the young.
The good news is that this is a problem that can be corrected, and the Fish and Wildlife Service is pursuing a public education program to educate anglers, and those who live near the water, about the need to retrieve broken lines, lures, and hooks, as well as to cut open the circles on plastic six-pack rings before throwing them in the trash.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has published this Fishing Line Can Kill PDF flyer (640KB) that alerts citizens about the need to retrieve fishing material that might one day endanger an osprey family. So help out the ospreys by passing along this advice to any family and friends who spend time around bays, rivers, marshes, and lakes, which are prime osprey habitat.
Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster