I’m kind of happy with some of the photographs I’ve been getting lately.
Ospreys are magnificent hunters, with a wingspan of 5′-6′. This one in particular flew past me a little while after I’d accidentally scared it off.
Here’s a video I found on YouTube of Ospreys building a nest:
That’s one of my favorite sounds of Spring. Ospreys are fish hunters, which means they don’t stay in frozen areas. They hunt by diving from fairly high heights, grabbing a fish, and then flying off with it.
A note: all these photos are clickable. Clicking on them gets you to larger versions and/or details about where the pictures were taken.
I have had some very nice opportunities to view Osprey. These are incredible fliers and hunters. They nest in giant platforms in huge nests.
In flight (two separate photos combined into one)
Ospreys will perch in trees, high above open water, watching for movement, such as shown below.
The first of the photos below is three photos of the same bird combined into one just to show some of the neat poses they can get themselves into.
In flight, they are incredible. Huge wings beat across the sky. They can fly extremely fast when they want to, but sometimes they will flap in a single location.
Here’s another video I found (I think it’s British– I’m not sure how far they travel beyond the US) of an osprey flying and hunting:
And one more, from a golf tournament:
Here are some still shots of various Osprey in flight:
And here’s one taken just after the bird went into a dive
This photo has a story behind it. There’s a spot in Western VT called “Dead Creek.” There’s an access area to the back end which sometimes yields great birds in the Summer (Osprey, Harriers, Black Crowned Night Herons, Bald Eagles, assorted warblers) and some pretty cool winter birds too (Ross’s Goose, Snow Goose, Rough-legged hawk)
There’s this one tree on the access road that just looks like the sort of tree that would have a big raptor on it. I always look, but never see anything there, save for two times. Once, I didn’t even have the camera ready and this Northern Harrier squaked at me and flew off. The other time, a year later, I was headed over there just before dawn and I had the flash bulb set up. I spotted this bird right above me, and got a couple quick pics before it got pissed off and flew to another spot:
Last year when we camped in Brewster, MA, we spotted this nesting platform and I walked around a bit and was able to get an ok photo of it:
For more about Ospreys, check out Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If you want regular e-mail alerts whenever I update new photos on my site (daily or weekly), you can subscribe here.
As usual, feel free to treat this as an open birding thread, and don’t forget to check out Daily Kos Environmentalists
There’s actually another Dead Creek in Franklin County in a triangle of land between St. Albans, Fairfield, and Sheldon. At the southern end of it, near Route 36, is the osprey nesting platform I mentioned before. The story of that nest and platform is that a pair of ospreys built their own nest, sans platform, on a utility pole about 4 feet from the roadside. There were near-misses as people driving by tried to see what was going on in the nest. There was concern that fish parts might drop into the road, attracting scavengers with resulting roadkill and cars going off the road to avoid making roadkill. And someone was quoted in an article as suggesting the osprey chicks would be at more risk with the road almost directly below.
CVPS took down the nest, put up bird-deterrent spikes and then built a platform four or five poles away, more like 30 feet from the road and directly over the water. The ospreys came back, built their nest where they were supposed to and have been returning ever since.
NanuqFC
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than we can see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~ Dorothea Lange