March may come in like a lion, but around here it goes out on the crooked wings of an Osprey.
As we March toward April, the recent trickle of Osprey returning from South America becomes a flood, as they pour in to reoccupy their huge stick nests on constructed platforms, powerlines, cell towers, ballfield lights, chimneys, docks, and even rocks. A few wacky Ospreys even try nesting in actual trees. Those who’ve been around remember that Ospreys weren’t so plentiful not that long ago, like when I was a kid. (We all like to think it wasn’t so long ago that we were kids.) I grew up birding in the 80s but didn’t see an Osprey in MA until I was out of college. So what happened?
Ospreys are a classic success story of the conservation movement, one where science, conservation, and legislation actually worked together to solve a catastrophic environmental problem. The pesticide DDT, the one Rachel Carson warned of in Silent Spring, was thinning the eggshells of Ospreys, eagles, peregrine Falcons, pelicans and other birds, in some cases driving them to near extinction over broad swaths of their former ranges. But within several years of the banning of DDT in 1972, populations began to recover. Here on the Cape, we have gone from one or two pairs of Ospreys in the 1970s to more than 500 pairs now.
The Osprey population between Boston and New York was about 1000 pairs in 1940 before plummeting 90% over the next 30 years thanks to DDT. Since the ban, and thanks to a shift to artificial nesting platforms and other human made structures, there may be two or three times as many Ospreys as before DDT – at least 1200 pairs in Massachusetts, close to 400 in Rhode Island, 800 in Connecticut, and populations are continuing to grow. Pairs in southern New England are still producing between one and two chicks per year, way above what is needed for population growth.
The problem is, we are running out of places to put them. Falmouth alone has 168 nests, which we know thanks to the work of Kevin Friel of the Falmouth Osprey project, an amazing grassroots effort to get safe alternative nesting poles up for Ospreys nesting on power lines. We’ve trained them to nest on artificial structures to the point that tree nests are rare, and nests on utility poles with live wires are all too common. Several of us from Mass Audubon, town conservation departments, and local wildlife rehabilitators have been meeting with Eversource for years to push for better management of Ospreys on electric poles across the whole Cape. Too many nests have caught fire because nests were removed at the wrong time or effective deterrents were not placed on the pole, where the result is power outages, dead birds, or both.
We met for years with little progress, but thanks to the efforts of former Eversource wildlife biologist Michelle Ford, there is now a Cape Cod Osprey Management Plan, with a website, and an email to report hazardous nests. Eversource has gotten better about selecting the right Osprey deterrents and placing them properly.
So by all means, report any dangerous nests you see to the Eversource email. There will continue to be whoopsies on power poles, like the Ospreys that had two nests burn at the Truro transfer station last year, then they caused a third outage with a carelessly dropped, half-eaten herring. Word was that ravens evicted the Ospreys from the nearby cell tower, pushing them onto the more dangerous utility pole, but from what I had seen the Ospreys and ravens had coexisted on the cell tower for years. My guess is relations between the neighbors soured when a conversation turned to politics, and the ravens decided they could tolerate the Ospreys nevermore.
