By James McGuire
Contributing columnist
For the past few weeks, an osprey has been regularly patrolling my home-base stretch of the Stillwater—winging swiftly upstream and down, passing our riverside cottage almost daily; sometimes several times the same day.
Ospreys are raptors, birds of prey—bigger than a red-tailed hawk, though not as large as the bald eagles who also consistently prowl this stretch of stream.
These big, distinctively shaped hawks are magnificent birds, with slender bodies, long, narrow wings, and long legs. Brown above and white below, they have a white head with a wide, dark-brown stripe slashing through their cheek and eye.
Seeing an osprey is always a thrill—a truly special moment. Ospreys aren’t common here along the river. Not nearly as common as bald eagles, which I’m apt to see daily.
But if I’m lucky, I’ll spot an osprey two or three times a year, sometime—ospreys being migratory—within their Ohio residency period between late spring and early autumn.
An old and oft-heard name for the osprey is “fish eagle.” This is quite fitting, as the bird’s diet consists almost exclusively of fresh-caught fish—about 99 percent of the time, according to the ornithological folks.
By contrast, the river-cruising bald eagles who wing by all the time—and on occasion sit awhile on a handy sycamore limb, and keep a watchful eye on the big pool and gravel bar in front of the cottage, plus the bird feeders and nearby banks and open ground— are more gourmand hunters. Catch-as-catch-can predators. While they may prefer fish, they’ll also occasionally vary their diet to accommodate other fare—small birds, squirrels, frogs, snakes, mice, chipmunks, crawfish, rabbits, and muskrats—plus most anything else of similar size, wild or domesticated.
Both the eagle and osprey are following the river’s winding corridor to hunt—on the wing and on the lookout, sharply scrutinizing the shimmering water below, hoping to spot a fish to grab via a quick and precisely executed on-the-wing dive-and-snatch maneuver.
However, not every ambush dive results in a catch for either bird. Ospreys miss their intended prey—or at least fail to keep it in their sharp talons—about half the time. From what I’ve observed, eagles probably have about the same success ratio—at least when it comes to snatching fish from the water.
Bald eagles, being the bigger, badder bird, will also steal a just-caught fish from an osprey. Ben Franklin felt this thuggish tendency reflected a decided lack of moral character, and disparaged the choice of the bald eagle as our national symbol.
Ospreys were pretty much extirpated throughout Ohio by the early 1900s. One of our state’s last nesting pairs, noted during the early part of the Twentieth Century, was recorded in 1913 at Grand Lake St. Marys. By the mid-1950s, DDT, along with similar pesticides and other forms of environmental contamination, had not only virtually wiped ospreys from the Buckeye State but also from most of North America.
Thankfully, Rachel Carson’s exposé book, “Silent Spring,” and Nixon’s newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), helped change all that.
Today we have at least 200 nesting pairs of ospreys in Ohio. They’re still not what I’d call common. But if you check around, and go looking in the right places—lakes and certain rivers—where a single osprey or a pair are reported to recently be hanging around, you have a good chance to see one.
Most of the nesting and summer-resident Ohio ospreys will, in the not-too-distant future, begin heading south—eventually migrating all the way to Central or South America for the winter. A few—perhaps birds not so keen on long-distance travel—choose to stop off in Florida.
Regardless, a big bird that depends strictly on catching an ample supply of fresh fish daily, wisely chooses to do his survival hunting business where the weather, water—and fishing!—is apt to prove more productive and will certainly be more comfortable.
This means my fleeting riverside osprey observations are a temporary gift. Time, season, weather, and the enigmatic foraging whims of the ol’ fish eagle itself, will soon spell an end to my transient pleasure.
But then, when September rolls around, there are always reminders on every hand pointing toward time’s passage and the season’s impermanence—signs and portents to be noted no matter where you look.
When I recently drove along the half-mile stretch of Route 40 that crosses the top of Englewood Dam, the lofty view from this elevated roadway was of the expansive sprawl of riverine woods on both sides of the stream far below. Though the foliage was still green, at least one tree species in the mix—cottonwood?—was starting to show a distinctly yellow-green cast, a mere hint of the hue to come.
Still, autumn was clearly moving into this tree’s foliage—beginning to exert its unmistakable forces. The color-masking chlorophyll green was fading away, and the underlying true leaf color was beginning to assert autumn’s showy hand.
Even though I wasn’t expecting it, I wasn’t really surprised to see confirmation that seasonal change was underway.
This year’s iteration of September arrived on the warm side, as if proffering a few held-over days from late July—though not, thank goodness, the daytime highs pushing 100 degrees that sweltering August sprang on us before moving off to wherever it is spent months go.
I’m happy with daytime temps in the 80s—especially when the nights drop down into the mid-50s, and a light blanket feels good if you like to sleep with the screen window opened. In fact, in my book, that’s pretty close to perfect weather!
But months and seasons change, and the weather always changes. Before you know it we’ll be looking at a dazzling patchwork of multicolored leaves.
Time moves on—and so will the splendid big osprey who’s been regularly plying the river.
Reach the writer at [email protected]
