By John Galluzzo
GateHouse News Service
Posted Aug 07, 2010 @ 06:00 AM
Copyright 2010 Wicked Local Duxbury. Some rights reserved
Each year the story repeats itself. The first ospreys appear on the South Shore in late March and by mid-April they’re already contemplating the year’s task. They meet (they mate for life) after separate vacations in the south, build or repair a nest on a high or low platform, and prepare to raise their next brood of young. Barring an untimely death, this process may continue for 20 years for mated pairs.
Down below, their human supporters get to work in concert with them. In fact, in many cases, they start even earlier, while the birds are in Texas, or Cuba or Florida. They repair leaning poles, replace rotting nest platforms, even march out onto a frozen salt marsh to erect male perch posts, where dad sits while mom is on the nest. Then, the note taking begins: the first arrival, the first captured fish, the first sign that mom is on eggs, the first peek of a tiny osprey head over the edge of the platform. Then, the big day arrives.
That big day has been taking place for more than 20 years now on the South Shore. Joe Grady, the Duxbury Conservation agent, helped erect the first pole in the region to try to bring back the vanishing osprey in the 1980s. David Clapp, then director of Mass Audubon’s South Shore Sanctuaries, joined him in the study and protection of the birds. Norman Smith, the longtime director of Mass Audubon’s Blue Hills Trailside Museum in Milton, joined the crew with his raptor banding license. Together on the big day, usually around July 1, they set out to band osprey chicks with hopes that someday the birds will be caught again, and that a little piece of the osprey life history will be revealed. Since big day number one, Smith has banded 220 young ospreys on the South Shore.
Yet, while the predictability of the natural cycles makes for a set routine, the birds themselves are sure to create variability in the emotional lives of the banding team.
Take, for instance, 2009. Due to the heavy rains of June and July last year, the lives of the birds were thrown off. Ospreys, expert fishermen, could not see well enough to the waters below to espy fish, and thus, their offspring suffered dearly. The Hull pair, visible from the George Washington Boulevard Bridge on the town line, did not even produce a chick, for the first time in nearly two decades. One pair in Duxbury resorted to feeding their young mussels. The reliable pair at Indian Point in Bare Cove Park was late. When the banding team arrived, expecting to find two- to three-week-old chicks, they instead found an egg, still warm, still being incubated. The team returned a month later to band the healthy chick, unsure of its potential for survival, as the adults would soon be on their way south.
The plan for 2010 was simple. Osprey chicks were being reported from Houghs Neck and Marina Bay in Quincy, the Substation Pole off Commercial Street in Weymouth and at Great Esker Park. Day two would consist of visitations to poles in Marshfield, Duxbury and Plymouth.
The team (sans David Clapp, now retired) set out on June 30, and immediately ran into a new experience, even after 20 years of such adventures. One member of the team, a young man helping to carry a ladder across the salt marsh at Rock Island Cove in Quincy, sank hip-deep into mud, having to eventually uncurl his toes from his boots and leave his footwear behind to be extracted.
The results, though, were fabulous. As Norman Smith climbed the ladder and scanned the nest, to the dismay and even rage of the mother, he announced, “Three chicks, and they all look healthy! Three weeks old.” He brought one down to show Linda DeMaggio, the local monitor. They were her kids just as much as anyone else’s, as she’d watch them grow from afar. Marina Bay produced the same tally: three birds, three weeks old, all healthy.
The meeting with Mike Doyle at Great Esker Park brought mixed news. There were chicks at the park, at the pole near the Reversing Falls, but the pair at Bare Cove Park, across the Back River, had not produced any young this year. “I checked the nest with a mirror,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “I read somewhere that was a good way to look at the nest without climbing up there.” Great Esker, though, revealed three chicks, all well fed and strong. The Substation Pole brought three more and a nice surprise for the banders. The mom was banded. The excitement over a possible future recapture and band examination floated through the team’s minds. Her life story was there, dangling loosely around her left leg.
Day two brought more success, 12 more chicks on six more poles. A visit to Saquish, at the extreme end of Duxbury Beach, produced a mystery, one quickly solved by Norman Smith. He dropped down from the ladder holding a whitish wing. “Second year herring gull, on eggs, attacked by a great horned owl. The head and wings were separated from the body, and the chest cavity was eaten clean out.”
“Welcome to CSI: Saquish,” one member of the team joked.
In all, the team banded 24 chicks in 2010, moving the total number from 220 to 244 in one season. By all accounts, the ospreys of the South Shore are having a banner breeding year, one that will greatly contribute to the ongoing recovery of the species in the region. Once thought lost to PCBs, which caused their eggs to be so fragile from lack of calcium that they crumbled beneath their mother’s touch, the osprey is going strong. By August the adults fly south, and a month later, so, too, will their young. How they know where to go, no one knows.
Then, in late March 2011, the process will begin again.
John Galluzzo is the adult education and citizen science coordinator for Mass Audubon's South Shore Sanctuaries and an occasional contributor to GateHouse Media New England..
Copyright 2010 Wicked Local Duxbury. Some rights reserved
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