Category Archives: Osprey

Osprey are back

One of my favorite reminders of spring is the return of the Osprey to our area.  They’ve been lounging the winter away in central or south america and they’ve travelled back up the coast to set up their nests and begin their next breeding cycle.

It’s hard to believe but it was nine years ago when I first began to photographing an osprey nest in Westborough.  I didn’t realize then that it would turn into a nearly seven year project, documenting their struggles to make a life on a small inland river.   I’m giving a talk on this chronicle of the nest to a local bird club this week and it was great to review the photographs and remember the great time I had spent documenting this pair’s lives.

Our local Osprey have returned to Acton so the possibility of another nest just up the road (but also up 100 feet) is exciting.  Almost more exciting are the persistent reports of an American Bald Eagle on our river and at a nearby pond.   Could we be entering a new “raptor renaissance” here in central Massachusetts?

Photograph: from the archives (2003) – Osprey delivering a fish to its mate at the nest.  Westborough, MA.

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Friday: Osprey Talk to Essex County Ornithological Club

I will be giving a talk on Friday evening at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA to the Essex County Ornithological Club.  I will be talking about my favorite bird, the Osprey, and my chronicle of an Osprey family in Westborough, MA.   I’ll be packing several hundred photos and lots of background information into my 50 minutes, so it promises to be a fun and, I hope, educational evening.    I’ll also spend a few minutes highlighting resources on the web that folks can use to track Osprey migrations and Jim Berry, from the ECOC, will talk about Osprey nesting activity in Essex County.

The program is free and open to the  public. The ECOC meeting starts at 7:30 and I’m scheduled to begin a little before 8pm.

Details on the event, directions, etc. can be found by visiting the ECOC web site.

Schmap.it link: [url]http://schmap.it/l3Lo8N?a[/url]

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Ospreys on the Assabet River

This rather unremarkable image of an Osprey pair at Assabet Reservoir in Westborough marks an important chapter for Osprey on the Assabet River — and a personal point of pride for myself.  We had received reports of their arrival in the beginning of April — this was expected.  What was unexpected was the news that they had set up camp on the nesting platform rather than the tree that has been the nest site for over a decade now.

We’ve known that the nest site was in peril for several years.  After about a 3 year wait due to warm weather we were finally able to get a team out on the ice in  February 2007 and erect an alternate platform (I’m the dorky looking one in the red jacket).  By “we” I mean folks at OAR and Mass Fish & Wildlife, the latter did most of the heavy lifting.  There were no guarantees that the birds would take to the platform, and while they treated it as a roosting spot the past two years there were no signs of treating it as a nest.

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One can only assume that the Osprey sensed the old tree was near failure and essentially moved the nest to this new platform (we’ve been fearing that the tree would fail while an active nest was there — a definite setting for a tragedy).

I’d like to say I purposely stayed away the past month to make sure there were no disturbances, and I’m sure that factored into my absence there the past month, but they now appear quite confident on the nest and were not alarmed at all when I came to photograph them (at a very respectful distance).   We’ll start visiting more frequently now, looking for some hatched eggs — having a successful nest this year will put a lot of smiles on the faces of the many people who helped keep this important nest site viable for years to come.

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