Monitoring the Martha's Vineyard Osprey Population    

     Gus Ben David, recently retired director of Mass Audubon's Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary and godfather to the 60-70 pairs of Ospreys now breeding on Martha's Vineyard, kept track of the Ospreys on the Vineyard from 1970 through 1992. During this time the Osprey population grew from 2 pairs to over 70 thanks to the efforts of Gus and his dedicated crew. Gus couldn't keep up with the censuses during the mid 90s, a period which saw a decline in the number of chicks the Vineyard Ospreys were able to raise.
     In 1998, I decided to pick up the censuses again. That year I visited all 114 nest poles on the Island (taking an interesting trip down Memory Lane in the process) and enlisted the help of land owners and Osprey aficionados to track the fledging rates across the island. The 1998 data were encouraging. For the 50 nests for which we had data, there were 33 successful nests producing 54 young, well over the rate of 0.8 young/active nest that has been calculated as the minimum required to sustain a population.
     The 1999 and 2000 breeding seasons were even more successful than 1998. Details can be found in our newsletters describing the project:

Spring 1999 (data on the 1998 breeding season)

Early spring 2000 (reviews the 1999 breeding season)

Fall 2000 (data on Y2K nests and satellite tracking)
Summer 2001 (Breeding pair count for 2001 and three new birds tagged)
Summer 2002 (Includes results of 2001 breeding season).

    Detailed data on the number of nesting pairs known and young raised from the 1998 breeding, 1999 breeding, and 2000 breeding seasons are also available.

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