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March 21, 2002 - Focusing on the ospreyThe Suffolk Times • March 21, 2002 This Is pr ring brings back the popular North Fork visitor Foc r on t S1 .e ospre The males return first to secure their last year's nesting site. ring ose behind, the females will arrive and together they will s their winter -torn nest for this year's young. ar those you who have your )rite osprey, "he" should be arriv- this week. The male will arrive L to claim the same nesting site that c used last year. The female will ow some time later. Ospreys ,uild their old nests each year. netimes this added weight is their wnfall (no pun intended) for as the ;t builds up, the weight causes it to this year was on March 13, when Bonnie called all excited, as she had seen an osprey at the nest on the causeway leading to Nassau Point. That was funny because just this week when I was out in the woods around our place I thought I heard an osprey call. That high - pitched call, once heard, will never be for- gotten. But try as I would, I couldn't see the osprey so I couldn't actually verify it. A few years ago through the DEC and The Nature Conservancy and other interested parties, Mike Scheibel over at Mashomack on Shelter Island helped with the capture of two of our ospreys and fitted them with radio transmitters. These were to track the birds' flights south in their falI migration. It was an exciting time following the birds as they traveled south for the winter. The male wound up in Cuba and stayed there all winter while the female, being more adventurous, traveled down through the Keys, through Venezuela and then spent the winter in central South America in an area called Pantanal, one of th largest freshwater ecosystems in the world. Pair meets again at nest Ospreys do not stay together when they migrate. Their ,only love affair is when they come back each spring to their own particular nesting site. We think they mate for life and the same pair will rebuild and hopefully nest at your favorite location. There are some strange things going on in the osprey world. We don't know why some areas pro duce ospreys year in and year out while others take deep losses each year and produce few young. Typi- cal of these is Mashomack, that huge preserve, one -third the size of Shelter Island, that you would think would have many nests. Twenty years ago they had 17 on that preserve alone. Last year they had three nesting pairs. Now why would that be? Gardiners Island, an evenmore pristine area than in the '20s, boasted of over 300 nests, then dropped in 1997 to 57 and, believe it or not, in 2001 only 36 nesting pairs were there. Why the lack of nesting ospreys in those once- productive areas? The good news is that the mainland seems to be doing much better. The North Fork produces good osprey popula- tions each year. As a matter of fact, the overall picture, that is, the active nests of all Long Island, shows us there were 279 active nests last year And from them there were 352 young ospreys fledged, which equals 1.26 young per nest and is very good. by Paul An ardent tollower of the ospreys is a young man named Paul Spitzer, who did a lot of work in the early years when pesticides were a problem for the ospreys. Last year he visited Mashomack to see if he could fathom why these once- popular nesting -site areas were in decline. Could it be great horned owls taking the young? Could it be raccoons getting into the nests and doing the same? Or, more probably, could it be the lack of a good food supply? Surely we don't have the number of bunkers or menhaden (a herring -like fish) that used to visit our bays and Sound in great schools. This once- plentiful fish provided the major source of food for the osprey. We still get little schools of bunkers in our bays, but nothing like the acres of bunkers that once plied our waters. As a matter of fact, in the early days the bunkers were so numerous that the farmers often took long sein nets and rode out, making a big circle from shore'to capture these silvery, 12 -inch- long -fish. They'd then be gathered up on the farmers' wagons and brought tc the fields and spread out for fertilizer. As time went on and opportunities opened up, fish meal plants sprang up mainly along the south shore. These plants had their factories in areas like Promised Land, which was isolated over by Napeague Bay. It had to be by itself because there was a charac- teristic odor of dead fish that kept people away. There also was one of these factories here on the North Fork. Its remains can still be seen if you walk west for a half mile from the Orient Beach State Park parking lot. But like so many things, modern improvements made bunker fishing ore rewarding. Bigger boats, bigger ets and ves. even men in spotter FOCUS ON NATURE by Paul Stoutenburgh planes that would fly out over the Sound or ocean and spot the dark . schools of bunkers then radio back their location to the mother ship, which would steam in, lower its boats and ring around the school with its long nets. Then slowly the nets would be drawn in with a mass of fish that was literally sucked out of the nets and poured into the holds of the boat. So efficient had they become that they overfished their own pot of gold. And so, keep your eye open for the ospreys' return. It gives us hope that all is not lost, for they became almost an extinct species back in the '60s, when pesticides had caused their numbers to dwindle down to almost Deer are like family On a different note, I'd like to bring you up to date with the ongoing saga of deer in our woods. Barbara's moved our breakfast table to the back woods' picture window and each morning we watch the deer come out, sometimes settling in our woods and sometimes just passing through. What I want to tell you about particularly happened on that rainy day we had last week. As usual, the four deer walked into our woods and were eat- ing the ivy that covers its floor. And then, in the rain, they decided to settle right there not 20 feet from our house. They dropped down on their front haunches first, like the cows do out in the pasture when they settle down, and then lay down. And so pretty soon we had four deer lying down in the leaves with a gentle rain coming down. All the while they were chew- ing their cud. We'd seen them about 7 o'clock in the morning and they stayed there until almost 1 o'clock in the afternoon, when something spooked them And they were gone, but it was the first time I'd ever seen deer as a group lie down, as the must do every day, and wait until evening, when they head oul o rnake theirlbraging rounds.