The bird exudes an odor, not of death but of fish and its own pungent perfume, that clings to museum specimens after decades of storage and identifies a feather found in the marsh grass with a single whiff. Its plumage is tightly scaled, with almost no down and a high, oily sheen. A plunge-diving bird like the osprey can’t afford to have absorbent down beneath its feathers; water would be forced in when it dove, and would soak it to the skin. An osprey rising from the water rouses itself like a wet dog, seeming to fly apart like a shaken mop.
One that has plunged several times in succession must spend an hour or more rearranging and drying its plumage before it tries again. Absorbent down would slow this process. Doubtless, the osprey’s lack of down, along with the movements of its prey, sends it south for the winter. Most are gone from the Northeast by late October, when winds turn sharp and cold. They seek the warm shallows of southern oceans for the winter. I shiver in sympathy as I watch ospreys return to their New England nest sites in early March, often incubating eggs as the snow still flies. That has to be a rude contrast to the Gulf Coast and Mexico.
I turn the dead osprey over and part its feathers. The fish hawk’s oil gland is huge, straddling the base of its tail like a pink saddle. Its life depends on oil, for without it the feathers would not repel the water when it dives. This bird was probably raised largely on menhaden, which had a good run in the Northeast in the summer of its birth. The oily members of the herring family, in fact, make up the bulk of North American ospreys’ diet.
So much to learn by handling a bird . . . The osprey’s nostrils are like nothing else I’ve seen: long and slitted, with grayish flaps of cartilage just inside. Further reading tells me that the flap is a valve that closes to prevent water from entering in a dive! I am puzzled by the structure of the osprey’s red-orange eyes, which would have faded to adult yellow by spring. They are large and protruding, and unprotected by the supraorbital ridge of bone that gives hawks, eagles, and falcons their stern, hooded glare. Within the eye, I expect to find a bony sclerotic ring, which stiffens the eyeballs of owls and many diving sea birds, but there is nothing in the vitreous humor. A thin, latexlike membrane holds the vulnerable orb in place, but there seems little to protect it from the impact of a dive. I think about this, reeling a mental film of the hundreds of dives I’ve witnessed. All the birds went feet-first into the water, letting their massive padded soles take the impact.
For all the cranial space taken by its goggle eyes, the osprey’s brain is comparatively large. I’m not surprised. These birds are alert to subtle signals from us and uncanny in their ability to put aside their fear of us after deciding that we present no threat. When I first set my chair and scope up on the dock, perhaps sixty yards from the study nest, the pair circled, giving mild alarm whistles. Soon, though, they settled down to watch me, and after perhaps twenty minutes’ observation, they completely ignored me. A few days later I reappeared with the same setup, to be met not with alarm but with placid indifference. And so it was for the season.
I had several conversations with the ornithologist Alan Poole, acknowledged worldwide as an expert on the species. Time and again he noted that osprey behavior is highly individual; in the preface of his book he quotes the ethologist Donald Griffin: “If one wishes to understand the behavior of animals, or still more if one is interested in their thoughts and feelings, one must take account of their individuality, annoying as this may be to those who prefer the tidiness of physics, chemistry, and mathematical formulations.”
In 1984, when Griffin wrote this, the science of animal behavior was deeply bound to quantifiable analyses. Ospreys differ wildly in their individual responses to stimuli. Poole notes: “A very small segment of the population is hyperaggressive. When you have a bird with the size and equipment of an osprey, you have to pay attention to that. It’s such fun to take green interns out who’ve never climbed a nest before. I’ll say, ‘This female’s a little bad; you have to have a stick to hold up over your head,’ and then there’s this tremendous WHOOSH and they gasp and turn pale.”
Dr. Poole points out that, being semicolonial, ospreys are in constant interaction with their mates and neighbors. The name of the game in osprey society is obtaining and holding a nest site. There is a continuous chorus of calls from ospreys nesting near each other. Poole describes osprey colonies as “almost like a bar scene. Males are constantly testing to see who’s available. They call and listen for the answer. Is her mate there? Is he calling aggressively? Is he flying up to you and chasing you out? Bingo is getting the female and the nest site.” Ospreys are constantly watching each other, testing and communicating their status, a rather unusual situation among raptors, which tend to nest singly.
“One of the things that jumps out at me,” Poole relates, “is how ospreys are able to recognize individual humans and their boats. They’re really good at pattern recognition. There could be a dozen boats out that they ignore totally, and then my little green boat comes out with a ladder sticking out over the end, and they go berserk. They know it’s me coming to climb up to their nests and pester them.
“Their calls reach a pitch when we put our ladder against the nest pole and climb up. If there were a ‘real’ predator, like a harrier or a fox near the nest, they’d never calm down. But as soon as we finish our work and turn away from the nest they are instantly calmer. They stop the hysteria, the pitch and volume of the calls go way down. It’s a routine for them.” (Poole had between thirty and forty nests on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, each of which he checked three times a week for five years.)
“They make a fuss when we’re coming, a big fuss when we’re in the nest, and then they breathe a big sigh of relief.”
As I would show up day after sunny day to sketch the Niantic nest, neighbors whose houses overlooked the marsh would wander down to introduce themselves. I gave sketches to some of them. I liked these people who liked ospreys. One neighbor told a story of the pair I was observing. “If I come out the front door and walk down to my mailbox, they don’t say a thing. But as soon as they see me put my boots on, they start yelling. I put my boots on way up by the front door, but they know that means I’m going to take the boat out. My boat is moored right next to their nest, and they don’t like my messing around there. And they yell at me from the minute I put my boots on until I’m out in the channel.” Ospreys are able to pick up clues on our intent from close observations of our behavior, to make connections between our present and future actions. I looked over at the neighbor’s house; it was hundreds of yards away. I marveled at both the ospreys’ keen eyesight and the mental leap they had made in anticipating their neighbor’s behavior. Many of the most telling observations of bird behavior are made by those who live among them.
One volunteer who went out on the marsh to replace a fallen nest pole told me about the pair of ospreys that circled over him, calling, the entire time he and his helpers were erecting the new platform. Within seconds of the final push to get it upright, the birds were on it. Their instant acceptance of artificial structures and the way they observe us as we build them show that the birds may understand more than we think of our doings and the direct benefits to them.
As a decadelong resident of Connecticut, I had to chuckle at a story related by an acquaintance, the ornithologist Tom Baptist. It is a perfect snapshot of both my former home state and the indomitable osprey.
In the fall of 2004, Audubon representatives approached Greenwich officials about the possible placement of a . . . pole and nest platform on the island in the center of Eagle Pond at the fabled Greenwich Point Park. The request was denied on the basis that the platform would degrade the quality of the view of the pond and its tall statue of an eagle, with its glorious wings spread wide, rising from the island in its middle. Well, local ospreys had their own opinion about the town’s rejection of Audubon’s request. [They] constructed this spring a large stick nest upon the wings of the eagle statue, and successfully fledged two young this summer from th
e new nest . . . The nest nearly obscures the entire eagle statue. The ospreys have nested on the statue every year since 2004.
Go ospreys! Get your dive on.
And now there is another way to know something of individual ospreys. Trapped on the nest using a noose carpet, an osprey can be fitted with a small solar-powered backpack containing a radio that beams signals to a satellite, allowing the bird to be tracked wherever it goes with astounding accuracy. The bird’s speed of flight, even its height above the ground, can be determined at any given moment. In some cases, the bird can be tracked to an individual tree where it may be roosting—within an accuracy of eighteen meters.
The osprey’s backpack radio is programmed to take GPS readings hourly and then to transmit data at intervals of between one and ten days. Each radio is assigned a unique identification number and is monitored by a satellite tracking company based in Toulouse, France. The tracking company has satellites circling the earth, mainly collecting information from ocean weather buoys, and they pick up the birds’ signals. Osprey researchers can connect to the company’s database and extract their data using a password. And nobody’s driving around in a Land Rover, radio antenna held aloft, listening to muffled beeps from the transmitter. It’s possible for the osprey researcher Roy Dennis of the Highland Foundation for Wildlife to open his laptop on his desk in Scotland and receive information transmitted within the hour from Africa. He downloads a set of coordinates into the Google Earth mapping system, and an individual bird’s migratory flight is mapped out on the screen before him. A record of an osprey’s movements and behavior that has never before been imaginable emerges. The tracking shows that birds display amazing fidelity to their wintering sites once they’ve chosen them, fishing in the same favorite holes and carving their food on the same trees year after year.
Not only does satellite tracking technology illuminate a heretofore dark chapter of osprey life, but it can save lives as well. Similar technology is being used by the ornithologist Rob Bierregaard to track the migratory movements of ospreys on Martha’s Vineyard. Through satellite tracking, Bierregaard found that the journeys of four out of four transmitter-bearing ospreys and dozens of banded individuals ended at fish farms in the Dominican Republic, where they were shot for taking advantage of easy pickings in man-made pools. Through direct contact with fish farmers and cooperation with conservation groups, which installed nets over the pools, he cut osprey mortality by 60 to 80 percent.
One well-traveled osprey, an adult female named Logie, has become famous, a star on BBC television. She nests in Scotland and winters on the coast of West Africa. I spent an afternoon reading Logie’s story from her first autumn migration after being fitted with a transmitter, in 2007, following her via blog-style, dated entries over the treacherous, fish-free wasteland of the Sahara desert and deep into western Africa, ending up on the island of Roxa in Guinea-Bissau.
On the morning of the twelfth of March 2008, she awoke in her usual roost tree, then lined out flying north-northeast at an elevation of 258 meters. She was off! I read the posts on her journey north with increasing anticipation, saw her back across the Sahara, rejoiced when she finally reached water and caught a fish. (Researchers could tell she was feeding because the transmissions showed she detoured out over water, then perched for several hours in a tree, presumably devouring her catch.) Her migration from West Africa lasted forty-three days, and she flew at least 3,619 miles (5,824 kilometers) in twenty-seven days of active migration; she also spent sixteen days waiting out bad weather. Her best day’s flight was 215 miles, and her shortest just 26 miles.
Logie was delayed by bad spring weather in Spain, and I worried along with all her fans as she fought to reestablish her bond with her waiting mate and take possession of her nest from an interloping female. In August 2008, her transmitter went dead, and, reaching that point in the narrative, I felt bereft. Roy Dennis, who’d been faithfully posting her whereabouts and welfare, advised that we’d all have to wait until spring of 2009 to know whether Logie was alive or dead. She never reappeared, so Dennis reluctantly concluded that she must have died early in her journey.
I was vividly reminded of how, over a period of years, my family and I became neurotically attached to my cell phone. Before I got it, I was incommunicado each time I left the house. Once everyone could keep constant track of me, my misplacing it or allowing its battery to die inspired panic in the ranks.
These are exceedingly interesting times for the student of birds, and ospreys are exceedingly interesting subjects of study. One tiny radio can forge a direct link between a bird and legions of people, can throw her into the light of our attention. What is everyday business to a fish hawk—crossing the Sahara desert, flying up and over a sandstorm, making 215 miles in a single day’s flight, fighting an interloping female for her traditional nest site—is an amazement to us. So much of what do simply to survive reaches into the realm of the unimaginable, and a proper awe for their adaptability and grit finds its place in our hearts.
I look back over my notes from what I now remember as my osprey summer. It is a sparkling August day, with a spanking northwester sending shots of sun off the wavelets. I’ve used the ospreys as my goof-off facilitators all summer. The sketches I bring home legitimize what has become my favorite pastime—hanging out with the osprey family. Humming, I pack a lunch and set off for Niantic. And there’s no one home. I set up my chair and spotting scope. A few yellow jackets buzz around scraps of the last catch. Snowy egrets poke white holes in the marsh, and common terns flee the ratchety calls of demanding young.
But the osprey family, even the reluctant young female, has finally ridden the breeze south. I feel deserted and lonely. I guess I thought they’d say goodbye, hover above me, casting a last glance over their strong brown shoulders. Silly of me.
What a changed place this marsh is without them. It’s like the empty set of a great play, a few stagehands crossing with push brooms. Nothing for it but to head home, I guess, and try to remember what I was doing before I was hooked by ospreys.
Nobody Can Cuss Like a Titmouse
FOR MOST of my life, I’ve tried to fix broken birds. Like most children, I was tenderhearted, and I had no idea one had to have state and federal permits to handle wild birds. I just cleaned up what our neighbors’ seventeen cats wrought, replacing baby birds in their nests, perching fledglings up higher in the shrubbery, trying to set broken wings with tape and Popsicle sticks, and raising those who had been orphaned. I learned a lot from my father, who was raised on a farm and knew how to nurture creatures. When I was in high school, we came up with a formula, fed through an ear syringe, that raised a nice, fat mourning dove. Dad knew that pigeons feed their young a milklike substance by regurgitation, and we went from there, using rolled oats, half-and-half, strawberries, and ground sunflower seeds.
Now, I have the pieces of paper that make such pursuits legal, and while I don’t seek out broken birds, they come to me through word of mouth or calls to Bird Watcher’s Digest. In mid-January, I got a call about a tufted titmouse that couldn’t fly. The couple who brought it to me said they thought it had hit a window; they’d found it lying on its back on their patio. Its drooping wing and missing upper tail coverts made me immediately suspect cat damage. We continued to chat, and the couple mentioned that they owned two free-roaming cats but that they didn’t bother birds. Such lovely people; I let that statement drop and allowed as how a sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk might have injured the bird. Two things I know: hawks don’t leave their prey lying on the patio, nor do windows grab birds from behind. It’s an old story, and one I’m weary of. Even innocent-looking, fat, old cats kill birds.
This titmouse was bright and active but reduced to scuttling around on the floor of his cage, his left wing hanging. To figure out what might be wrong, I wet him to the skin and examined him carefully. My ears rang as he cussed me up and down. Nobody can cuss like a wet titmouse. In an ideal wing exam, one manipulates the bones of the wing a
nd listens for crepitation, the sound of broken ends rubbing on one another. I had no chance of hearing anything over his earsplitting protests, but his wing bones checked out fine. I did find a massive purple and green bruise over the left scapula, which went a long way toward explaining why he was grounded. If bruising was all he had, and the scapula wasn’t broken, this bird might just fly again. If the stars aligned, he might fly well enough to be releasable. It doesn’t take much of an insult to the delicate bones, muscles, and nerves of a songbird wing to render it permanently useless. I decided to see what a small cage, a couple of weeks’ rest for that wing, and about one thousand mealworms would do for him.
As the days went by, the titmouse got wilder and wilder. He began to ricochet off the bars of his cage when I entered the room, bing, bang, bong! He whistled peter peter peter and scolded me lustily. One night he whistled at 4:00 A.M. and my husband, Bill, leapt out of bed, thinking his cell phone was ringing!
If things go well, there comes a moment in a bird’s rehabilitation arc when you walk up to its cage and know it’s ready to go. I had seen this one stretch both wings up over his back in a quiet moment, and I noticed him using the injured wing a little more each day. Now, twelve days later, he was hitting the sides of the cage so hard that I knew I had to release him before he damaged himself further. It’s a delicate choice: I wanted to release him when he was sufficiently healed but before he lost his wild edge. So I closed the door of my little eight-by-ten-foot bird room and opened the doors of his cage. He shot out like a watermelon seed and clung to the screen over the window. He passed his test with flying colors. This titmouse wanted OUT!
The Bluebird Effect Page 9
