Osprey in flight.
Vince Patton / OPB
There may be more osprey nests per capita in Lincoln City than any other urban area. There is even one pair of birds that returns every year to nest on top of the lights of the high school football stadium. The local chapter of the Audubon Society hopes to train citizen scientists to learn more about the area’s dense osprey habitat. Ruth Shelly, vice president of the Audubon Society of Lincoln City, and Susanna MacDonald, a volunteer with the organization, tell us more about these raptors and what they’d like to learn about them.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. There may be more osprey nests per capita in Lincoln City than in any other urban area. There’s even a pair of birds who return every year to nest on top of the lights of the high school football stadium. Now, the local chapter of the Audubon Society hopes to train citizen scientists to learn more about the area’s dense osprey habitat. Ruth Shelly is the vice president of the Audubon Society of Lincoln City. Susanna MacDonald is a volunteer with the organization. They both join me now. It’s good to have both of you on the show.
Susanna MacDonald: Thank you.
Ruth Shelly: We appreciate being here.
Miller: Ruth Shelly first, why do Osprey like Lincoln City so much?
Shelly: Well, Osprey want what every visitor wants, and that is great food and accommodations. 99% of an osprey’s diet is fish, and Lincoln City has been blessed with seven miles of beach, two major rivers, a large freshwater lake, and a big estuary bay, all of which have abundant seafood. But we also have many nest sites, both natural and constructed.
Miller: What are the constructed sites that you’ve provided?
Shelly: Well with a wingspan of almost five feet, osprey need an unobstructed landing spot. And typically they would, in a natural environment, go to the top of a dead tree. But in the absence of that, they start building on top of utility poles, telephone poles, light poles, cell phone towers. And in response to that, Lincoln City residents, and people throughout the state, have either constructed platforms on top of these towers to protect the equipment and the osprey, or they have built dedicated osprey nesting platforms which the osprey are very happy to use. It’s a great example of a bird feeling very comfortable in an urban environment.
Miller: So it’s reciprocal. Folks in Lincoln City say they like osprey as much as osprey like Lincoln City?
Shelly: Absolutely. We consider them our neighbors.
Miller: Do you recognize some osprey that come back to the same areas year after year?
Shelly: I know that I do. I drive past an osprey nest on East Devil’s Lake Road every day, and it’s a great joy to see them returning in spring and raising their chicks, and then leaving in fall. It’s relatively easy to tell male and female osprey apart. It’s not quite as easy to tell individual birds apart, but they do tend to go to the same nest sites year after year. Sometimes they’ll move to a different site if their favorite is disturbed, but you can be pretty assured of their regularity and faithfulness.
Miller: And faithfulness not just to a place, but to their partners?
Shelly: Absolutely. Osprey made for life. And they are just a delight to watch as they raise their chicks, who then take their first migratory flight out of Lincoln City to someplace south where it’s warmer, most usually Mexico.
Miller: Susanna MacDonald, why have you become so interested in these particular birds?
MacDonald: Well I started watching ospreys when I was a child over in Central Oregon. I’ve always loved raptors. However, my real passion and interest was sparked about 8-10 years ago, when I saw a livestream camera of an osprey nest overseas in the UK. I began watching that camera feed every day. They had chicks that year, I watched the hatch, I watched them grow up, I watched them fledge, and then eventually migrate. I just basically fell in love with ospreys. I started learning as much as I possibly could, read lots of books, watched lots of videos, and it just continues to grow. They’re a fascinating dynamic bird to watch and to learn about.
Miller: If people see some big majestic wrapped that’s hanging out somewhere or flying, but they’re unsure of what bird they’re looking at, they’re not sure if it’s a hawk or an eagle or whatever, what are the easiest ways to identify osprey in particular?
MacDonald: So ospreys are quite unique. They don’t really look like any other raptors. They’re about two feet tall as adults, and they have as Ruth mentioned a really, really wide wingspan. The top half of their body is brown, underneath is white. If you’re looking at them from a distance, one of the most striking and unique markings is on their head. They have a black stripe that extends from their eye around to the back of the head. And so if you’re looking through binoculars, once you’ve seen an osprey, it doesn’t look like hawks, it doesn’t look like an eagle. You’re going to remember that that’s what it is.
They also have a particular wing shape. So if you’re watching for ospreys flying, that’s sort of an “m” shape, whereas an eagle and a hawk have a much more streamlined, straight wing shape. They’re just extremely beautiful. They also don’t really soar. A lot of hawks or turkey vultures will soar around in circles. Ospreys are active fliers, so they’re going to be flapping their wings more than other types of raptors.
Shelly: They’re also very distinctive in their diving behavior, because they can dive from 30 to 100 feet straight down into a body of water. And if you see a raptor doing that, it’s most likely an osprey.
Miller: Let’s have a listen to an osprey call, then we can hear more about what they do after they dive down. This is what they sound like.
[Osprey call plays]
Miller: That was recorded in 1977 on the Rogue river near Grants Pass, it is part of the Macaulay Library, a gigantic repository of bird sounds at Cornell University. So Ruth Shelly, you were telling us that if we see a rapture diving down into the water to catch fish, it’s most likely an osprey. Can you explain what makes them so good at catching fish?
Shelly: Well, I’ll start and have Susanna join in. They have incredibly sharp talons. And one thing that is unique about an osprey is that it can reverse one of its toes so that it can grab onto a fish with two toes on either side for a real firm grip. And they have a behavior of once they’ve caught a fish to rearrange it in its claws so that it can point the fish head first, to optimize the streamline effect of flying with a very heavy fish.
Miller: So instead of holding a fish in its talons sideways, which would make it less aerodynamic, the fish and the birds are both head first so it can fly away quickly and take it to its nest?
Shelly: Exactly right.
Miller: Susanna, what else do you think all Oregonians should know about these raptors? I should note that as of five years ago, state lawmakers have decided that even though there’s a state bird, which is the western meadowlark, we also have a subset, the state raptor, which is the osprey. What should all Oregonians know about these birds?
MacDonald: One of the really interesting things about ospreys is their unique presence in our various ecosystems. And so we have ospreys nesting and breeding in nearly all areas of the state. The only areas that they would not be nesting is in the desert areas on the eastern side of the state, because of course their diet is primarily fish, and so they need to be around within two to three miles at the most of a body of water with shallow water where they can catch fish. And as such, they’re sort of an indicator species as to the health of our waterways and lakes and rivers and estuaries along the coast. They’ve been around for 13 million years. They can tell us about the health of our waterways, and that’s a really key role that monitoring osprey populations can help us understand.
Miller: What are you going to be having citizen scientist volunteers be doing right?
MacDonald: This first year, we’ll be having volunteers from the community each watching a specific nest from March until September. Since these are migratory birds, we actually won’t see them until sometime in March. We’re interested in learning when the birds actually arrive. We know just from ourselves watching nests around the area [that] it’s going to be in March. But as we start to monitor individual nests over time, over a number of years, we will be able to start to identify when the birds are arriving, and that can give us clues as to whether possibly these are returning pairs or if they’re a new pair. A new pair might take longer to establish itself on a nest, so we’ll be asking the volunteers and the observers to document when the birds arrive, when they leave in the fall, we want to know how many nests are occupied, do any of those nests fail? Sometimes we see some efforts to build a nest in a certain location that then the pair give up on and move somewhere else. But we already have established more than a dozen nests where we know they’ve been nesting last year. But this will give us a baseline this year to have real data that we can build on.
Then we want to know how many chicks are in each nest. Once the chicks are about four to five weeks old, we will be able to see them above the rim of the nest, so we’ll be able to count how many chicks are in each nest. And then we want to know, do those chicks survive? Do they survive to fledge, which is to fly off the nest? Do they survive to migration? An osprey nest is pretty much considered successful if at least one chick fledges.
So those are data points that will be starting with this year. And we’ll be asking our volunteers also to report any other interesting behaviors. Part of this is education, to help people learn about characteristics of ospreys and osprey behavior.
Miller: And just briefly Ruth Shelly, what are the biggest threats to osprey?
Shelly: Well, the biggest threats are toxins in the waterways, because big fish eat smaller fish, and osprey at the top, and the toxins accumulate, are magnified as they go up the food chain. And so that’s a threat.
Another threat is fishing line and baling twine, which osprey get entangled with as they line their nests. And so the most that we can do to keep our waterways clean and safe and to keep physical pollution at bay. What’s good for birds is good for the planet.
Miller: Ruth Shelly and Susanna MacDonald, thanks very much.
Shelly / MacDonald: Thank you.
Miller: Ruth Shelly is the vice president of the Audubon Society of Lincoln City. Susanna MacDonald is on the planning team for the Osprey Awareness Initiative.
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