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Outside Magazine February 2004

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Natural Acts
Birds on a Wire (cont.)

The birds backed their butts to the edge of the nest when a pickup passed so they could rain down white shit. Eee-eee-eee! they cried.

OSPREYS MIGHT BE tolerant, but they're not compliant. Unlike falcons trained to bring home the bacon, or Challenger the bald eagle, who swoops into Yankee Stadium during the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at big games, ospreys refuse to do tricks. The only interaction I saw between humans and Duke's bunch was the game the birds made of backing their butts to the edge of the nest when a pickup passed underneath so they could rain down ten-foot slurries of white shit. Eee-eee-eee! they cried in glee afterward.

I worried also about the nature of our neighborhood, which is a redneck Shangri-La of big dawgs, trucks with bad mufflers, heavily armed Gomers, and gangs of marauding feral boys with BB guns. Although the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes harming an osprey a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $15,000, I've seen people in these parts fire shotguns at most anything in the air. But this time the neighbors surprised me. As soon as everyone learned that Duke and Doreen were raising babies, people began moving to the porches of their shitboxes after dinner, binoculars trained on the nest, following every osprey move.

And so a sort of peace reigned through June and July as the birds settled into a routine. For a few minutes in the morning, while Duke watched over the nest from a two-wire pole in a nearby hayfield, Doreen flew to the river for her morning constitutional, and then right back, usually lugging a cottonwood stick to add to the nest. (Some venerable nests weigh 500 pounds, and are repositories of crime tape, animal bones, dolls, bicycle chains, and barbed wire, not to mention mounds of fish parts putrefying in the sun. One of the linemen told me that the first time he was ordered up into the cherry picker to relocate an osprey nest, the overpowering smell made him vomit.)

Next, the adults spent several hours preening, debugging, and screeching at other birds to keep their distance. One day, when a turkey vulture appeared far overhead, Duke ran him off, staying on the scavenger's tail till both birds were out of sight. In the afternoons, Duke headed for his favorite perch, on a limb below his old nest, which allowed him to scrutinize the shallow channel below. It usually took him less than an hour to dive-bomb a fish and return to his power pole to eat it, snapping his wings at the squadron of tiny sparrows trying to herd him away from their forest nests in a defensive maneuver called mobbing. While he tore off bits of fish, his family cried pathetically for a bite.

During this ritualized begging, I watched Sissy more than once peck Sonny upside the head, and couldn't help remembering the many times my own beloved sister had kicked my shins bloody in fights over the tetherball. When Sonny finally got to eat, the piece of sushi Doreen offered was puny. But to my relief, both chicks grew so fast I thought they were on steroids. By mid-July they weighed as much as their parents—about three or four pounds.

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