It's Time to Bid Farewell to Our Queen's Creek Oyspreys

I've been leading a program at New Quarter Park called BYOK (Bring Your Own Kayak) for the last 5 years. One of my regular pleasures is watching the Ospreys arrive and build their nests out of branches perched precariously on channel markers and platforms. On our 2 1/2 hour paddle up Queen's Creek and back, we pass a half-dozen nests and see more at a distance. Kayakers enjoy watching the big birds raise their young, dive for fish, screech, and soar majestically. We float as close as they'll allow and snap photos of families as they grow through the season. All of this happens between March/April and August/September. Alas, about this time of year they migrate.

This Saturday I'll be leading BYOK and talking to participants about the Ospreys and their habits once again. I'll tell them that if they come to BYOK next month, the birds will be gone, off to "darkest Peru," to quote Paddington Bear.

Well, not exactly Peru. Although they might go there, our East Coast birds probably migrate to someplace along the East Coast of South America. I received my copy of BirdScope in the mail today and was interested to learn about an initiative to fit Ospreys with solar-powered satellite transmitters and monitor their route to learn more about migratory patterns and assess potential threats to the migrating birds. BirdScope is not online (it's a benefit of membership!), so I can't link you to it. But I've copied a bit of it here for your information.

Backpacking Ospreys: Peering over the shoulders of migrating Ospreys

by Alan Poole 
 
On a clear morning in early September 2008, a three-month-old female Osprey named Penelope pushed off from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and flew, alone, 2,700 miles to French Guiana in 13 days. 

She touched down in coastal Maryland and North Carolina for three days, lazed along the Bahamas for four, then blew through the Dominican Republic in 29 hours. At dusk she launched out over the Caribbean, flying all night and the next day to a tiny island off the coast of Venezuela. A week later she was exploring rainforest rivers in French Guiana, her home for the next 18 months.

Twenty years ago we couldn't imagine the extraordinary trips that these fish-eating raptors -- our summer neighbors on their big stick nest -- take routinely . . .  Now researchers can strap a 0.75-ounce, solar-powered satellite transmitter onto the back of an Osprey and know the bird's location, within a few hundred yards, for the next two to three years. 

. . . With the help of Google Earth, we can see ecological details about the places Ospreys winter by visiting http://bit.ly/ospreytrack . . . [This project] is providing much-needed data revealing migrational differences among Ospreys and helping pin down where threats to Ospreys lie.

(Alan Poole is the author of Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History (1989, Cambridge University Press).)

Wouldn't it be fun to suit-up one of the Queen's Creek Ospreys with a backpack and watch online as he or she travels?

Ah well, join me on Saturday to see our birds off: Until next year, dear feathered friends!

Note: The summer issue of BirdScope also includes a story from the Biodiversity Institute in Gorham, Maine, about birds and tracking mercury pollution. Friends of New Quarter Park and readers of this blog may be interested to know that this is where our "Bluebird Girl" Allyson Jackson is headed this month for employment. Another farewell! Be safe and prosper!