Farewell, Osprey
Say good-bye to an osprey — if you can find one. My neighborhood nests are all empty and their eerie whistle waded into memory.
Beginning in mid-August, the fish hawks left their summer homes all along the Eastern seaboard for winter grounds in the Caribbean, Central and South America.
Where osprey go we know from the work of osprey followers like Rob Bierregaard, who has tagged with transmitters birds all along the coast.
Migration of his tagged birds began on August 14, one day short of the earliest migration date.
Snowy, the first to head south, “was a bird on a mission,” Bierregaard writes. “She arrived back at her wintering area in northern Cuba just eight days after she left her staging area in Long Island.”
Not all migrating osprey make a beeline. Many circle and dally for weeks at good fishing grounds.
Doing things “the normal way” was Crabby, a young female osprey tagged by Bierregaard.
“From Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay, she started south on August 25 at 10:55am,” he wrote. “She spent her first night at Kerr Lake on the Virginia-North Carolina border. Next stop was the Congaree Swamp just north of Lake Marion in South Carolina. She blew through Georgia and spent the night of the 28th in northern Florida and made it to the Everglades in southern Florida on the 29th.
“That was the last we’ve heard from her, but this is pretty typical of our cell-tower birds. From here on, they can make it to South America without being near a cell tower (the only way we hear from them). We’ve had birds that we last heard from on the eastern coast of the U.S. in the fall only to have them show up again the next spring. But we’ve also had a remarkable number of cell-tower birds find towers in Haiti and down deep in South America.”
Learn about migrating osprey and follow the migration at www.ospreytrax.com.