MARCH 27, 2011

We are trying to remember what we saw.  When we got up this morning, a  large, dark bird was hulking over the nest.  Beside it was a smaller figure that also looked like a bird.  Absorbed with the Sunday papers, we didn't give it a lot of thought.

By early afternoon, the large bird was gone and the smaller shape had not moved.  Jack went out on the dock to investigate. The shape is a bird that looks much like a decapitated osprey.  Large bones are caught in the sticks hanging over the edge of the nesting platform.

Overhead an osprey wheels in the sky, then drops to the nest.  We think it's the female.  She stands for a long moment on the corpse.  She looks about as if she's trying to understand what has happened. Then she takes to the skies again.

MARCH 24, 2011

The female is sitting on her nest in the gray morning light.  Suddenly she spots a black speck coming up the river.  Her attention -- and ours -- is riveted.  The osprey takes off and flies downriver toward the speck, which veers inland about a half-mile away.  The female returns to her nest, arranges her wing feathers and settles in.  We all are glum.

"Look who's here!" Jack cries this afternoon as I walk through the door.  I am pleased, but puzzled, at his effusive greeting until I realize it was not for me.  The male is back.

Outside are much flapping, joyous peep-peeping and a renewed enthusiasm for gathering sticks for the nest.  Inside, there is palpable relief.

MARCH 22, 2011

Two men arrive from Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage.  They conclude instantly that to straighten the pole they need to jettison the nest.  Before I can protest (as a female, I resent this waste of the osprey’s time and effort), the nest is gone, the pole is upright and the osprey is nowhere to be seen.  I think she must be furious that her handiwork was destroyed in such a cavalier manner, but Jack assures me the Wildlife guys said ospreys prefer to build a fresh nest every couple of years.  I am dubious, but the men are right.  Soon the osprey returns to the platform with a twig.  By nightfall, a number of sticks are in place.

MARCH 17, 2011

The rope is in place and the osprey doesn’t seem to care.  The pole is still bent and she doesn't seem to

care about that, either. The first few days she was here, she went fishing in her graceful way of skimming the water.  Now she’s picking at the nest and making swooping missions to our neighbors’ shoreline to find twigs.

She casts a worried eye downriver.  Where is he?

MARCH 14, 2011

The osprey is here.  She’s sitting atop her nesting platform as we take our morning coffee and newspapers out to the sunporch. 

We’re delighted to see her, of course, but we wish she’d waited a few days more. Gale-force winter winds and moving ice floes have bent the platform pole.  We had intended to straighten it before she arrived.

Now we feel guilty.  This bird has just flown from Costa Rica and we were too lazy to have readied her summer home.

The osprey goes fishing as we discuss what to do.  Should we tie a rope to the pole and then to the dock to pull it straight?  Will the osprey, which is irked by even the smallest change in her environment, abandon the nest?  Should we call Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage, the people who installed the platform?

OCTOBER 12, 2010

OCTOBER 12, 2010

The autumn minuet has begun.
One day in mid-September we noticed that the ospreys were simply gone.  We don't know if they departed en masse or whether they drifted off to their winter homes one by one.
The geese have arrived. By the dozens and by the hundreds, they sail down into the cornfields, and chatter loudly as they peck about for stray kernels. Hunters and their retriever dogs are in the fields, too.  They're hiding their gun blinds beneath mounds of mowed cornstalks.
Cormorants perch on navigation markers and buffle-head ducks bob serenely on the river. In Anchorage Cove, the great blue heron has resumed his patrols of our shoreline. With his ancient foes, the ospreys, gone, he has the salt marshes and tidal flats to himself. He has even flapped up to perch on the ospreys' abandoned nest.  With an intent yellow eye, he looks downriver for signs of the coming winter.