Bang Bang Bang!
While approaching Jo Durt’s tower last week, I was striking my aluminum ladder as hard as I could. Bang, Bang! It was a subtle trick of great courtesy I learned from Kathy Clark. It’s like knocking politely on the door instead of just barging in. It gives the incubating female a chance to come out and see who dares to disturb her nest. It’s better than her fleeing in a panic at the last moment.
“JO, I’M COMING UP TO CHECK ON YOU,” I yelled, striking the aluminum even more violently this time. I could feel the tension in my tight frown. I was no longer being courteous. In frustration, I was brutalizing my ladder because I already knew something was very wrong.
I missed the early nesting season this year as I was busy launching the new OspreyWatch app and website in New York. Although I knew that completing the project by April 1st would mean missing the early nesting season, I agreed due to the importance of the project. The Osprey is an indicator species, and last year several instances of catastrophic starvation were reported in the Mid-Atlantic, indicating that something is not right. It could be climate change, pollution, trouble with marine fisheries, or a host of other problems that will eventually affect us all. This was a chance to ensure that the 10,000 citizen scientists doing nest checks and submitting data to OspreyWatch could do so in a way that enabled their observations to be used to get to the root of what is causing so many nest losses.
Although I was running late, I found solace in the fact that I could still monitor Jo Durt’s and other nests through live cameras that I had installed over the past few seasons. Being stuck out of town, I checked in on Jo Durt twice a day- in the morning and evening. Everything seemed to be going well. Jo Durt and her mate, Kids on Grass, mated in late February, right on schedule, and even a little early. Soon, Jo started spending hours outside the igloo, which usually indicated that she was about to lay her eggs. Then, all of a sudden, everything went silent.
It is normal to observe a sudden increase in camera activity as the female is about to lay and stays close to the igloo. After laying, the female retreats inside the igloo to incubate, which results in an equally sudden and surprising drop-off in activity.
But after a week, it was clearly a little too quiet. So I started checking more frequently, especially late at night and before dawn when the still silence of the world and the soft glow of infrared light make it easier to detect even the slightest movements—yet still nothing. I started checking every hour. Nothing. It was unsettling. So I raced back to the Island and rushed to the tower to have a look.
Inside the igloo were two scrapes where she would have laid. It is not unusual to have two, but I’d never known Jo to dig more than one.
Jo never kept house too well, but I noticed the igloo was in an especially deplorable condition—bones, feathers, bills, and carcasses covered the entire substrate. Removing the debris, I found two owl pellets, which is never a great sign of a healthy, well-defended nest. It looked like the igloo had been abandoned for years. But I had seen them on camera just a few weeks ago.
I was puzzled, but fortunately, we expanded our Little Egg Prey Cam project last year. I had a camera recording everything that happened at the nest all winter, 24 hours a day. So I pulled the memory card and prepared to leave to see what the photos might show to help explain what possibly could have happened this winter at the BOIS tower.
From the looks of it, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know. But as Kathy once said with regards to the importance of monitoring raptors for signs of issues in the environment, “If you’re not looking, you’re not going to see it.”
I stood up to leave and gazed from east to west with deep sadness and immense frustration. I couldn’t see a single falcon anywhere. I worried for a moment if they had decided to move back to that cursed bridge, but given that this was their territory, they wouldn’t let me sit around on that tower without at least coming to check on me. The silence was unsettling. There should be someone here. This is added a tiny bit of sheer terror to my rapidly evolving emotional state.
It was difficult to imagine what had happened. Something had clearly been lost. But if we lost him, Jo would still have laid and be watching over the eggs. If we lost her, he would never be so quick to abandon his territory.
What are the chances we could have lost both of them in just the last week? It seemed improbable.
And unfortunately, these events become exponentially more improbable given that the exact same thing had happened just a month earlier at a nest just across the Bay from Jo Durt.
And even more so with what I was about to find on that memory card.
Say something kind