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Tagging and map updates from Rob. The adult male he was trying to tag was on the Ayers Island cam nest, he banded the female while he had her. He's going back on 7/12 to put transmitters on two of the juvies.
Greetings,
It has been a very hectic spring. Selling our house in
Charlotte, finishing up at UNC-Charlotte after 15 years, house
hunting in the Philadelphia 'burbs, and a trip north to tag new
Ospreys has left little time to do much else but breath. Hence the
long silence from Map Central on what our Ospreys have been up to.
When last I updated you, all our adult males had returned to
their nesting areas and Buck was up in New Hampshire. Buck has been
almost constantly on the move between Virginia and New Hampshire. I
haven't calculated how many miles he has covered yet, but I believe
it will be well in excess of 4,000 miles since he made landfall at
Cape Fear, NC, back in late April. He has now been in 17 states, only
missing Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine east of the Appalachians. He
keeps trying to get back home, heading southwest from wherever he has
been, but when he gets to Virginia or NC he turns around and goes
back northeast. Most strange.
My trapping trip in May was disappointing and frustrating to
say the least. With 5 transmitters to deploy, I was only able to tag
2 adult males. I got one in Long Island (neighbor of North Fork Bob),
who was dubbed "Tucker" after his home town of Mattituck, and a male
on Martha's Vineyard, whom we're calling the Katbird. This name plays
on his nesting location on the Chappaquiddick side of Katama Bay.
The trip got off to a great start on Long Island's North
Fork. We caught our target bird there in just a half hour or so and
started to feel cocky about the trip. Then New Hampshire happened.
I have begun a new collaboration with Iain MacLeod of the
Squams Lakes Natural Science Center. New Hampshire hosts a healthy
population of some 60 Osprey pairs. While some of these are found
along New Hampshire's modest coastline, most are scattered about the
state's inland rivers and lakes. Our plan for the first year of this
new study was to tag 2 adult males and 3 juveniles. We want to
compare the hunting behavior of inland birds to those we've tagged
along the New England coast and to add some more juveniles to our now
fairly substantial data base on first migrations.
After the New Hampshire leg of the trapping trip, we have
downsized that plan to probably just tagging 2 juveniles. Tagging
males is never the guaranteed deal is it with juveniles (I'm 31 for
31 trapping post fledging young), and we only had 2 nest that were
accessible (via bucket trucks). As it turned out, the males at both
our target nests did not feel compelled to sit on eggs after we had
trapped their females, so I left New Hampshire 0 for 2 and headed for
Martha's Vineyard, where I planned to tag 2 males.
On the Vineyard I had the luxury of lots of nests to chose
from, so I expected that I wouldn't have any problem getting 2 males.
I still thought that after we tagged a bird at our first nest without
even having to catch the female first. Then I got a serious dose of
humility as we set up at 4 more nests and could not catch another
male. We caught the females at 3 of these nests, but only had one of
the four males even land on the noose trap. Totally frustrating. One
interesting bit of data that we collected in the process was
discovering that the female at the Lake Tashmoo nest where we have
tagged 3 juveniles (Tasha, Belle, and Meadow) is a 15 year old bird
banded as a nestling over in the Westport River colony.
To add to the sad tales, one of the nests in New Hampshire
where we planned to tag young blew down in a violent storm just last
week, and the Katbird's nest failed, most unfortunately because of
our trapping him. This has never happened to me or anyone else who
has tagged adults around their nests. We've had some birds stay away
from their nests for extended periods, but have never seen a bird
react as negatively as the Katbird, who stayed away from the nest for
3 days. The good news is that he's back around the nest with the
female, so if they both make it through their next migration cycle,
they'll be back to breed again next spring.
And then, piling it on, we learned that our Long Island bird
was killed about a month after we tagged him when he flew in front of
a bus.
Wildlife biology is always invasive, and our studies often
stress the animals we are studying. We do everything we can, of
course, to minimize the stress, but cannot avoid it completely. As
sad as it was to see this nest fail, I'm still comfortable that the
knowledge we've gained about Osprey migration and conservation is
worthwhile.
I've moved from Charlotte to the Philadelphia area and will
now have time to update the maps. On the 12th of July I'm heading
north for another trapping safari. We plan to tag 2 juveniles in New
Hampshire and either 2 juveniles or 2 adult males on Martha's
Vineyard.
Best, Rob
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FAQ
They also left out the migration, over the ocean, many young ospreys take.... 
