Nest-building begins! A few sticks from last year’s nest remain, and the female has tamped down the grass in the center. The male takes off on low-flying reconnaissance missions and most times comes back with a 3-to-4-foot stick.
He places it awkwardly on the nest, and more than once, it falls into the water. The female retrieves it and the male goes off again.
The platform is the preferred nest site from the human perspective, but not necessarily from the ospreys’. They build nests in channel markers and buoys, and atop telephone poles. Last year, an adventurous pair assembled a nest over the traffic lights on the Miles River Bridge. One day it was gone and we suspected that road crews had removed it. For a day or two, we saw puzzled-looking ospreys wondering what had happened, and then in another day or two, they rebuilt the nest. This time it stayed.
A three-hour power outage on the Miles River Neck this morning was blamed on nest-building ospreys.
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