When we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. - John Muir

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OSPREY BASICS

GUEST COLUMN

THE OSPREY TRIBE

Have you found ospreys, too?

The Osprey Tribe

I plan on constantly adding and editing the names and bios you’ll find here. Please send along any relevant information and I’ll be happy to include it. Also, let me know if I got things wrong. I’ll begin with a kind of narrative contact list of the folks I have met during my osprey journeys, and then just list as many links as I can at the bottom.

Our tribe is larger than you think, and, certainly, more intense. The osprey expert and biologist Alan Poole once speculated about a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon osprey people, and in his book on the birds he related a missionary's story of how a Bolivian Indian "slipped a warm bone" from an osprey under the skin of his arm, "apparently in hopes of absorbing hawk-like skills at hunting." That seems a little drastic, but maybe it would be worth it to slip a bone under your forearm, especially if it woke you to the world and instilled an enlivened sense of purpose.

“ Enlivened” seems an appropriate adjective for many of the osprey people I have met in my travels. What follows is a kind of informal introduction to those people, as well as to their links, resources, and books.

* I’ve already quoted Alan Poole, and it makes sense to begin with him since his book, Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History, was one of the sparks for my own interest in ospreys. Though Alan’s work is rigorously scientific, he often betrays his background in literature and his love of the lyric. Alan’s book is must reading for the budding ospreyologist. He has a B.A. in literature from Princeton University, a master’s degree in forest science from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in ecology from the Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole, MA. More importantly (from our point of view), he spent 6 years studying Ospreys in Florida and southern New England. He is the editor of The Birds of North America project.

* Most of the great photos of ospreys on this site were provided by Michael Male and Judy Fieth, who have been working together on natural history films since 1980. Their film, Return of the Osprey, tells the story of the osprey comeback from DDT, and their osprey photos are unmatched. To see more of their work please visit Birdfilms.com.

* My own recent migration from Cape Cod to Venezuela and back would have been impossible were it not for the work of Rob O. Bierregaard. Rob’s website is one of the easiest, and most exciting, ways to follow the routes of migrating ospreys through satellite telemetry. Visit this site a few times and you’ll become invested in the fates of individual birds.

My own feelings toward satellite telemetry are somewhat ambivalent, though I admit to hypocrisy since I took full advantage of other people’s tagged birds to learn about osprey routes. Whatever my feelings, there is little doubt that following the birds on their migrations is the future of osprey research, since so much is already known about their nest life.

Rob received his B.Sc. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania for investigations of competition in the ecological structure of raptor communities. He has studied ospreys of Martha’s Vineyard, MA, off and on for more than 30 years.

Rob’s work follows that of the kind of founding father of satellite telemetry research on ospreys, Mark S. Martell. Mark received his M.S. in wildlife conservation from the University of Minnesota in 1990. As Coordinator of Conservation Programs at the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, he has done research on many raptor species across North America and in Costa Rica. He has studied Ospreys since 1985, focusing on reintroduction, population management and migration.

* Dennis Puleston, who died in 2001, is one the early heroes of osprey research. A true renaissance man, Dennis sailed around the world alone, was co-inventor of the amphibious DUCK boats used in World War II (and now for tours of cities like Boston), and studied (and sketched and painted) ospreys on Gardiners Island off Long Island. He was one of the first people to realize that numbers were dropping in the osprey world, and in part thanks to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, began to put the puzzle pieces together and realize that the culprit was DDT. Along with Dr. Charles Wurster, who ran tests on the osprey eggs that Puleston had collected and determined that they did indeed contain DDT, he helped found the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967. Art Cooley, another founding member of the EDF, recalls that the motto of this fledgling organization was “Sue the Bastards.” The amazing thing, for those of us who have grown used to a sense of impotence when it comes to environmental issues, is that it worked. They did sue the bastards, and did prove that DDT was the culprit. Then, in 1972, the newly formed EPA banned DDT in the United States. The results were dramatic and immediate: ospreys, which had been all but wiped out in the northeast, came back strong. The EDF is now known as just Environmental Defense.

Dennis’s legacy is carried on by the Post-Morrow Foundation and the Dennis Puleston Osprey Fund. A wonderful web cam has been set up just off Dennis’s property and the group that follows it is a passionate and welcoming one.

* Another site that is near and dear to my heart is that of the web cam for the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. This site is less than a mile from the birds I watched during the writing of my first book. The museum began filming the birds last year and has been a huge hit on Cape Cod.

* The osprey comeback would have been impossible without homes for the birds to come back to. Osprey habitat had been dramatically reduced, but the birds have proved adaptable and ready to build their large nests on top of platforms and poles that human being had erected. The work that Gil Fernandez did beginning in the 1960s, transformed the Westport River (in southeastern Massachusetts) into an osprey mecca. Gus Ben David played a similar role on Martha’s Vineyard, helping shepherd the birds back.

* Another early osprey hero was Paul Spitzer. He was one of a group of young biologists, inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, who began to document the effects of DDT. By 1968 he was climbing into East Coast osprey nests, finding weak, thin eggs collapsing under the incubating birds. He then carried out experimental egg switches between the heavily DDT-contaminated ospreys that were disappearing from his home on the Connecticut River estuary and the cleaner, better-hatching osprey colonies surviving in Chesapeake Bay.

* During my recent trip following the osprey migration, I had the good fortune of running into Keith Bildstein, who is the Sarkis Acopian Director of Conservation Science at Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania. Keith was both knowledgeable and affable and helped me understand the basics of migration. His most recent book is Migrating Raptors of the World.

* One of the highlights of my recent osprey trip was standing atop la Gran Piedra in Cuba with Freddy Santana Rodriguez. Freddy is the young Cuban ornithologist who has studied the exciting–and dense-- migration through his country. He has now established watchsites in the western part of Cuba, including the one on La Gran Piedra (the big rock) near Santiago and a new coastal site nine miles away in Siboney. This past fall (2006) Freddy’s team counted more than 6000 ospreys and together with gran piedra there total was 9936 birds.

* On that same trip my contact in Venezuela was Adrian Naveda-Rodriguez. Adrian seemed to know everyone in the bird world in his country and helped us find wintering ospreys wherever we went. In 2001 Adrian took part, as Research Assistant, in the Harpy Eagle Conservation Program directed by EarthMatters in Venezuela. Since 2002, Adrian has assisted the field work of the National Wildlife Inventory Program and is the Assistant Curator of the Ornithological Collection of the “Museo de la Estacion Biologica de Rancho Grande.”

* One of the finest places to watch migrating ospreys in the United States is at the Cape May hawk watch platform. For a nice piece on ospreys returning to cape May, check out this piece by Clay Sutton in the Cape May Times.

Cape May is also home to Paul Kerlinger, who has, for my money, written How Birds Migrate, one of the best and most accessible books on bird migration.

* I’ve already mentioned the osprey cam at the Puleston nest and the Cape Cod cam, but there are some other good sites where you can feel like you are really inside the nest. Another of the best is The Friends of Blackwater, a site that also has many great links to other osprey sites. The Friends of Blackwater are a nonprofit citizen support group for Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge located near Cambridge, Maryland. The Friends have been operating a live Osprey Cam on their website since 2001. The cam is located on a tall artificial platform that is alongside the Blackwater River and not far from the Chesapeake Bay. Since 2001, each cam season has provided at least one fledgling chick, with a record year occurring in 2006, when an amazing four chicks hatched and fledged successfully from the platform. In addition to the Osprey Cam, the Friends also provide an online Osprey Gallery and an Osprey Cam Web Log, which helps visitors follow the cam action and learn more about North American ospreys.

* One of the most generous people I have run into on my osprey travels has been Tim Gardner, president of the International Osprey Foundation. Tim lives on Sanibel Island, and his neighbor is osprey expert and guide Mark “Bird” Westall, who may do the nest osprey imitation I’ve ever heard.

* Elsewhere in Florida, Mike McMillian is doing great work on Lake Istokpoga, which may have the densest osprey population in the U.S. I am used to northeastern nests that are often on manmade platforms, and I was overwhelmed by the romance of this spot, with its Spanish moss and cypress trees, and where different pairs of ospreys sometimes build more than one nest in a tree. For a nice article on Mike, go to the National Wildlife Federation website.

* The osprey comeback in the UK is a great story, and Roy Dennis is at the center of much of it. There is a site for the Lake District Osprey Project, and a short article on Fiona McLeod and the appeal of the Lake District ospreys as an eco-tourism success story. Fiona McLeod has written a paper on the ecology of Highland ospreys that I have not yet been able to get my hands on.

* Also based in the UK is a website devoted to the Glaslyn Osprey Project, a project led by Emyr Evans.

* There's also the Rutland website about the comeback of ospreys.

drawing courtesy of Dugald Stermer * For great drawings of ospreys and other creatures check out the work of Dugald Stermer. He drew the osprey (and osprey eggs) for the hardcover of my first book, Return of the Osprey.

* Gardiners Island, where Dennis Puleston did his osprey research, is still privately owned, but osprey guides of Long Island give tours around the island.

* For a nice photo sequence of an osprey dive, check out the article I mentioned above about Lake Istokpoga and Mike McMillian.

* Gerhard Schulz has some stunning osprey photos.

* For a nice discussion of building nesting platforms try The Friends of Blackwater.

* Then there's Jennifer Monson and Bird Brain Dance. Jennifer has
performed several dances celebrating bird migrations, and in 2002 she danced her way from Maine to Venezuela, celebrating the osprey migration, stopping along the way to perform.

* Here's a site for the Citizens United Osprey Colony Project along the Maurice River in New Jersey.

* There's another osprey forum as well. Forum members track ospreys from all around the world via webcams. The site is most active from March to September.

* Finally, for sports fans, here is the website of the Neath Swansea Ospreys rugby team. Check out the cool black and white uniforms. You also might want to root for the Seattle Seahawks in the playoffs. Or the school where I teach, UNCW.

LINKS

David Gessner

Birds of North America

Birdfilms.com

Rob O. Bierregaard

Environmental Defense Fund

The Dennis Puleston Osprey Fund

Post-Morrow Foundation

Cape Cod Musuem of Natural History

Gus Ben David

Hawk Mountain

Migrating Raptors of the World, by Keith Bildstein