Expanding Populations of Kestrels and Ospreys

There were two eggs in the box, both nearly intact with fluid still inside despite the leakage from slight cracks. The shattered remains of a third egg lay nearby. The best efforts of the pair of kestrel falcons had failed this year, perhaps because of the scarcity of grasshoppers due to the cool rains.

Many things can go wrong to thwart the drive for new life, and then the fleeting fertility will be wasted. However, this pair had produced young the previous three years. Last year at this same time there were four young falcons alive and alert in an alternate nest box.

This year, a different pair of kestrels has been present in some extensive hay fields a mile away. It is likely that one of them is an offspring from this pair's previous three clutches. Three miles away in a huge gravel pit, another pair has resided all spring and summer.

The American kestrel is a rare hawk in New England now, and to have three nesting pairs in one town is unusual. It is likely a testament to the value of providing nesting boxes as well as the deep drive of these creatures to reproduce. There are fields and grasshoppers enough, but there are no larger dead trees to provide nest sites.

The modern taste of homeowners, farmers, and road crews is to cut all trees that betray a hint of decay. Trees are meant to be pretty, they feel, existing only to please the human eye. Leafless branches and trunks are ugly and must be removed from view.

The other day a cutting crew came down our street and three vehicles and six workers attacked several dead elms across the street. It took all day, but the stately snags were hacked into many pieces and pushed up in a pile, not exactly pretty. Once they would have been carted away and burned, but at least we have learned that kind of husbandry is unwise.

Now that we have mastered so many of nature's secrets, we tend to over manage. It is thinking born of our own long and difficult legacy of needing to survive in the wild. Sometimes it has taken enormously obvious bad results to convince us to abandon the need to tame nature.

Fifty years ago we sprayed whatever chemical came out of the test tube and promised to eliminate inconvenient insects. Then we discovered the hawks were gone and the songbirds following after them into oblivion. Are we ignoring the slower effects of more subtle acting substances we still use to make our own lives easier and richer?

This past weekend, I watched two young ospreys practice their flying in the middle of Nauset Marsh on Cape Cod. During the decade of the 1950s these fish-eating hawks of southern New England were wiped out by pesticides, but now they have flourished among us again. It was fun to watch the full-grown young raise and stretch their wings, waving those mighty pinions at the world.

One would launch off the platform and beat the hundred feet to an adult sitting quietly on a nearby perch. Then, in time honored fashion, the bird would buzz its parent, who would raise its head and flutter its own wings in seeming disgust. Then back to the nest the bird would fly, to alight and beat those wings again.

They were the impatient ones, ready to savor the world as well as the many fish that awaited in the sea. It appears to be a good year for small bait fish as well as copepods, the small crustaceans that form the basis of the food chain in coastal waters. The osprey is only one of many species that benefit from a healthy and fertile ocean.

You can see the osprey here on the Connecticut River patrolling the deeper water for fish to dive for, or bathing in the shallows off a sandbar. Usually, a bird born the previous summer will not return to its birthing region the next year, instead sampling the fare of other waters. Eventually we hope a pair of these young ospreys will decide to nest close by, just as the kestrels and eagles and peregrines have done.