Claws - I grabbed this young male off his nest atop an 80' water tank at the PSI Pharma facility that makes milk of magnesia from water taken from below CHSP. The nest is rigged with a camera that feeds to a TV monitor at the State Park Nature Center a half mile or so away. His sibling, hatched a full week after Claws, was not ready to fly. As it turned out, Claws could indeed fly, he just didn't know it yet. 

We took him down to ground level where we banded him and outfitted him with his new GPS transmitter. When we returned him to the nest, he leapt off the nest and sunk his talons into Holly Niederriter, a DE Division of Fisheries and Wildlife Biologist who was helping me out. I was already half way down the ladder when this happened. Holly pried the bird off her and put him back on the nest. We gave her naming rights for the ordeal, and she chose, appropriately enough, "Claws".      The next morning Claws was on the tower, but not in the nest, which is on a platform several feet above the top of the tower. I went up to make sure he was OK, and when I got to the top of the tower he took one look at me and decided he was more scared of me than he was of flying, so I got to watch his first flight. He flew beautifully around the tower for a few minutes. His landing on an adjacent tank was not so beautiful, as first landings often lack much grace. Later that morning he was in the nest, seen on the TV down at the Nature Center.

Patience - This young female was tagged in the Delaware Seashore State Park, south of Dewey Beach, just a mile or so north of the Indian River Inlet. The nest is the neighbor of the nest where we tagged Della in '06. 

Patience and her sibling were already flying and probably had been on the wing for at least a week. We arrived around 2PM and set up our noose carpet with a couple of fresh mackerel under it. Within fifteen minutes we caught the adult male, who landed on the nest and tried to grab the fish, getting his talons tangled in the nooses in the process.      We quickly got him off the noose carpet, banded and released. Fifteen minutes later we caught an adult female, which we likewise removed from the trap. It turned out she had been banded as a nestling 2 years before close by. When we caught her we thought she was the adult female at this nest.

 An hour later we caught the real adult female at the nest--setting a record for most Ospreys caught that we didn't want to catch, and realized that the first female we caught just happened to be flying over and, seeing the two fish in the nest, decided that if no one else wanted them, she'd help herself.
     At about 4PM the two young landed on the corners of the nest (not on the noose carpet) and just sat there. We watched them for 3 hours, as they preened, occasionally looked at the fish, and sometimes begged for food. Clearly these youngsters are spoiled rotten. A bit after 6 the adult female landed on a third corner of the nest and sat there for about 45 minutes. Eventually, the screaming young got to her, so she hopped down on the fish to feed them. At that point the hungrier of the two young landed near her and walked over to her, getting caught in the process. After the long stake out, CHSP's Director of Environmental Education, Richard Julian, suggested the name for this bird, who is now wearing the transmitter I recovered from one of the DE birds tagged last year.

On the 26th I flew to Martha's Vineyard for the final leg of the trapping trip. 

 

Luke - Early on the 27th, Dick Jennings and I set up our noose carpet at the Mink Meadows nest on the Vineyard's north shore. This has been one of the most productive nests since I re-started the Osprey census in 1998 and this year fledged two young. When we set up at 0630, there was not an Osprey in sight, which made us needlessly nervous. Around 8 we had an adult show up and by 9:15 a young bird landed on the nest and was caught. We tagged this bird with a GPS transmitter. The bird is named in memory of John Luke, a great friend of my family and a devoted Ospreyphile who lived in the Mink Meadows Osprey's backyard--or is it vice-versa?

Felix - On the 28th we set our noose carpet on the nest at Mass Audubon's Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary. Mass Audubon has been a great supporter of the tracking work, kindly processing all our finances, and the 60-70 Ospreys that now nest on the Vineyard are pretty much there because of the efforts of long-time Sanctuary Director Gus Ben David. Gus, who retired a couple of years ago, and his Osprey crew are responsible for most of the 115 nest poles on the Island, so it was an obvious place to tag a bird, and the name was similarly easy to come up with. We were ready with "Felicity", had our bird turned out to be a female. In fact, we're not completely sure we shouldn't have used Felicity to name this bird. Female Ospreys, like all birds of prey, are larger than males. It's pretty obvious when you have a small male or a really large female, but sometimes the intermediate birds are a bit tricky to sex. Let's just say I wouldn't be completely surprised if Felix comes back to the Vineyard in 3 or 4 years and lays some eggs!

Here are a couple of shots of setting the noose carpet as we prepared to trap Felix, courtesy of Rick Solberg.

    Trapping went fairly smoothly--no problems with catching adults this time, and that was a good thing! The nest in Delaware, where we caught 3 adults, was only about 12 feet off the marsh, so it was no big deal to throw the ladder up to the nest and extract our birds. The Felix Neck nest is about 40' high, so I have to use a ladder to go up the first 20' and then pole spurs then next 20'. I did not want to do that for anything other than our target youngster, so we were ready to run up to the nest and deflect any adults that came in on a landing approach. 
     We did have to wait until 11 for any action, because when we arrived at 6AM to set up, breakfast was being served in the nest. The early bird gets not only the worm, but occasionally the fish as well, it would appear. One of the two young was around the nest most of the morning, but not particularly hungry, having had sushi for breakfast. It made a few passes at the nest, but was put off by the noose carpet and flared off just before landing. 
     Felix spent the latter part of the morning over on an unoccupied nest pole, about 100 yds from the nest pole, waiting for Dad to bring home a fish. Around 11 Dad did come home with an early lunch and went over to land on the spare pole where the youngster was waiting. That would not have helped us, so we flushed the adult male a couple of times as he tried to land on the pole. After getting bumped off the pole the second time, he flew over to the nest and landed on it, fish in talons. Felix flew over to him and got snagged in the carpet around 1115. He is now wearing a GPS transmitter.

Conomo -- Our last transmitter was placed on a full sibling of Moshup, the youngster we tagged in '06 at the very productive Lobsterville Nest, which is located out on the southwest corner of the Island. Informed sources tell me that "Conomo" means plenty of fish in the local Amer-Indian (Wampanoag) dialect, so it's a hopeful name for the bird. This trapping session went pretty smoothly, and we had our bird in hand again at 1115. The year before we had to wait until about 2PM before we caught Moshup. We recovered this transmitter after Moshup was shot in March down in the Dominican Republic.