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Outside Magazine February 2004

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Natural Acts
Birds on a Wire (cont.)

WHILE MILODRAGOVICH cooled the chicks by sprinkling water on their pinfeathered backs, which bore the pale tan stripe of the immature osprey, one of the linemen knelt down to fan them tenderly with the morning news.

"Ain't that the life," a lineman said, pointing up at the osprey I'd named Duke. "All this guy does all day is lay around and fish."

"Man, ain't that the life," he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"The dad, their old man?" he said, pointing up at Duke. Like most osprey males, Duke was smaller than his mate, and his gleaming white throat didn't bear the necklace of spots displayed by the female. "All this fucking guy does all day is lay around and fish."

The nest arrived intact at its new location—next to the road, and 30 feet away from the old pole—without shedding more than a twig. The bucket of the cherry picker came down, and Sonny and Sissy went back up. Although ospreys seek homes on the highest point around, they sometimes build backup nests, the equivalent of a cabin at the lake. So the last chore for NorthWestern Energy was to bolt a PVC pipe to the top of the crossbeams on the old pole so the birds couldn't build there again.

As the convoy of vehicles retreated down our lane, I withdrew to my front pasture, across from the platform. Within seconds Duke and Doreen were hovering over the nest and their craning chicks and, with a palpable sense of relief, settling in for a long day in their new digs.

At midnight a ferocious thunderstorm blew in. Clara, our border collie, cowered at my feet as I stepped onto our front porch to see what I could see, certain that the gale would blow the ospreys away. The wind was driving the rain at acute angles, and the windows were shuddering from the thunder. But there, illuminated in a strobe of lightning, was the nest, the white crown of Doreen's head just visible. By morning, Duke and Doreen were busy feeding and shading their kids, as if the night before had just been a scary dream.

Lesson number two: Besides nest robbers such as the great horned owl and the raven, and a couple of egg-sucking varmints like the raccoon, there isn't much in nature that ospreys fear. The most serious threat to the species was wrought by the hand of man. Before organochlorine insecticides like DDT were banned in the U.S., in 1972, in part because they cause thinning and eventual rupture in the shells of their eggs, ospreys and other raptors such as the peregrine falcon were surely headed in the direction of zero. But now, on any summer day, you can count all sorts of busy, occupied nests when you float from our place 20 miles downstream to the Alberton Gorge, the Clark Fork's Class III whitewater. The bird is again such a major player in these parts that the local rookie-league baseball team, affiliated with the Arizona Diamondbacks, named itself the Missoula Osprey. ("So much fun," the franchise promises, "you'll drop your fish.") The 2,000 or so fans who show up for big games stomp, shriek, and flap as one during the traditional Osprey Dance.

Still, I fretted about something I'd learned about Sonny. Being the second-born and the smallest, when the pecking orders were handed out, Sonny got hosed. He wasn't in as much danger as if he'd been hatched last into the more common osprey brood of three chicks, but as the smallest sibling he ran a risk of starving to death, or being pushed out of the nest by Sissy. This is because Duke, who helped Doreen incubate the eggs and who would do the grocery shopping until the kids could fish for themselves in August, would feed himself first, then Doreen, who would eat her fill before tearing off any remaining shards of sucker, bull trout, or whitefish for Sissy. Sonny would eat last, and for him the pickings would be slim.

Although I understood that this strategy increased the chances that at least one of the chicks would fledge—that is, grow up strong enough to fly—the working-class chip on my shoulder that had always compelled me to wallow in inequities was now bidding me to side with the underbird. But really, the whole family had vexed me from the moment Duke and Doreen began building this new nest, one stick at a time ferried to the top of that power pole. Why didn't they just return to the perfectly good crib they'd built the season before? After all, it was right next to the water and all those tasty denizens within, and a quarter-mile removed from the county lane, with its confusion of traffic. Had the birds gone nuts?

Probably not, Milodragovich told me. The old nest might be too buggy. Or maybe, because the meandering river had undercut the bank below their old ponderosa, Duke and Doreen sensed that the tree was no longer safe. Most likely, he said, other birds had snatched up all the high-rise apartments in old-growth trees along the river. So why a power pole by the road? Well, why not? Ospreys are successful worldwide partly because they readily adjust to the noisy affairs of humans. When the baseball team began building what will be its new ballpark, in downtown Missoula, and opponents of the edifice pointed with self-satisfied irony to a pair of active osprey nests less than a thousand feet from what will be home plate, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist named Rob Hazlewood was called in. "If we were to have a problem with these two nests, we'd have to halt construction in all of Missoula," he said, alluding to the heavily nested river corridor that runs through the city.

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