April 15, 2007
Osprey Battles & the Lost Egg
First, I wanted to apologize for the fact that our website was unavailable on Friday evening and early Sunday morning. On Friday afternoon, our web host installed a major security upgrade on their web server that took us offline for almost four hours (without warning) and then they had a server looping problem on Sunday morning that took us briefly offline. We're sorry for this as these episodes are just as frustrating for us as they are for our cam watchers, and we hope the server issues are now fixed.
As a reminder to our new cam watchers, whenever the Friends website is unavailable, you can still catch our cams at WildCam.com. If you registered for the recent contest, just sign in with that info and you can watch both the Eagle Cam and Osprey Cam from their site. If the problem is with the cameras themselves, it won't help to go there since they get their cam feed directly from us, but if it's strictly a website accessibility problem, you can likely see the cams there.
Osprey Battles & the Lost Egg
Well, it appears we now have some insight into the mysterious behavior of our osprey couple. If you didn't see my last web log post where I talked about the confusing behavior of our couple, be sure to read that, but we now think we know what is happening. It appears that a second female is showing aggressive interest in the platform nest. We've been seeing images that show a female with a darker necklace (chest coloring) on the nest at times, and her presence is causing enough havoc that our couple cannot get down to the business of raising a family.
The action started around the middle of last week when we noticed that we weren't seeing two birds on the nest even though egg-laying time was near. Then when a second bird finally showed up at the end of the week, the two birds were not interacting -- just kind of staring at each other. On Friday night (when our website went down) an egg was laid in the nest, but very little incubating was done throughout the cold night, and on Saturday the egg largely sat alone in the nest while the three adults were fighting with each other about who should be a couple and who should be on the nest.
This dynamic is not new in the osprey world. At the famous osprey nest in Loch Garten, Scotland they had a strange female attack EJ and Henry -- the established osprey pair. Often when the resident female EJ was attacked, she would disappear for long periods -- just as our female was doing. Biologists speculated that the strange female could have been a bird that was ready to lay eggs but lacked a nest in which to lay them.
This is not too dissimilar from our story of the eagles George and Martha at our local Woodrow Wilson Bridge near Washington, DC, where a female attacked Martha and tried to dislodge her from the nest. The invading female needed a mate and a nest, and wanted what Martha already had.
On Saturday, both Bob Quinn and I were at Blackwater Refuge and observed the battle going on between the ospreys at the cam platform. In Bob's photos you can see one female catching a fish, going to the nest with it and chasing the other female away, only to have that female come right back to chase off the fish-carrying female. They both landed in the marsh, where they sat glaring at each other. [Note: Bob has some additional photos after that showing a water platform nest -- that's a different osprey nest than the cam platform.]
In my video clip, I saw the male get involved in the fight as well. A female was on the nest and the second bird came in to chase her off. When both landed together on the nest, the third bird dove in to chase off the intruder, and all three flew off together. Then the intruder landed again on the nest, only to have another bird dive at her. Left-click on the WMV movie link below or right-click and choose "Save Target As" to download to your computer:
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| Osprey Battle (3.8MB) |
During all this action, the egg was sadly forgotten in the nest. We're not sure whose egg it was (meaning which female) and we doubt it could have hatched since they left it uncovered for so long, but still it was unfortunate to see the crows discover it during the many times when the ospreys were off fighting with one another. It didn't take long for the crows to break the egg and eat the contents. They left some of the shell in the nest and took the rest, but eventually most of the shell disappeared.
We honestly have no idea what will happen now. In Loch Garten, the osprey couple was able to finally drive off the invading female, after which they laid a full clutch of new eggs, but I'm not sure if we'll get that lucky. At this point we would be very happy to see one couple get to the point where they can produce an egg or two in peace and salvage some of their nesting season. But we'll just have to wait and see what develops.
In the 2005 Osprey Cam season, we had a late egg-laying couple and they laid eggs on 4/28, 5/1, and 5/4. The last two eggs did hatch and the chicks fledged successfully (although rather late), so we do have a few more weeks for the ospreys to finish off their fighting and still have time to lay eggs. Here's hoping they do.
Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
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