Osprey of Long Island Sound - Gotta Getta Fish! Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge

© 2019 Mark Seth Lender All Rights Reserved

Fog, drifts. A knife-edge divides the dawn. Above, clouds and darkness. Below, the darkling sea, at rest. Quiet remnants of a storm that came in the night and left in the night. How the lightning must have terrified him, the young osprey, on the nest on his own. Where he slept alone. The first time in his life. And the night was long. And woke alone also to the terror that is hunger.

The fog lifts. Now Young Osprey makes for the Bight. Where the eddies churn all along the sand bar and to the left and the right menhaden feed on silversides, and the clinker blues feed on them. And him to take big and small as and if he can, written in the circle of life. The signs are good. The water is cool. The bait will rise. The outflow is running to the lee and the sea will be smooth as waxed stone. A place he will see for the first time all in the glow of the knife-edge line. Where he has tasted from. And known, against his feathered skin, by weathers coursing over the dune front and between the houses that stand a ruined phalanx all along the shore. And heard, in the waves’ roar.

Beneath a sun dull as molten iron ore he cannot hear it anymore, only the blood, hammering in his ears:

fish - fish - fish - fish - fish - fish

Gotta catcha fish, Gotta catcha fish, Gotta catcha –

fish -fish - fishTipping of the tail, Flashing of the scalesGotta catcha - Gonna getta - Gonna find afish, fish - fish - fish - fish - fishDIVES! - and Rises - DIVES! - and Rises -

Shaking, the water slaking, a rain of his own making, taking, his life’s force away from him a drop at a time all, for nothing. He circles then hovers the ocean covered granular and dark as emery cloth; he must see through.

fish, fish, fish

Till I finda fish Till I catcha fish

PLUNGES!

Osprey struggles, falls back pulls up, up, to his neck and shoulders wings outspread around him and the weight of the wet keeping him bound. To give in is to drown (like so many come before him). While the gray of the sky and the blinding eye of day both ignore him. It is all will, he is all in, it is never, or it is NOW:

One! Last! Thrust!

- And in his talons -…FISH! …FISH! …FISH!…Gotta FISH! …Gotta FISH!

I GOTTA FISH!!!

Field Note:

On the day he was abandoned the young male osprey called and called to be fed. The “feed me” is a rapid high-speed call, easy to discern in its specificity but also because it is one of an osprey’s few vocal routines, each with little variation. As compared to other birds of prey (and predators in general) they are actually quite talkative. Their quarry, underwater, is not going to hear their landward noise. Nevertheless, their vocal repertoire is limited, obviously so as compared with the corvids (crows, ravens, blue jays, etc.) and certainly in comparison with herring gulls who are loquacious and whose language is highly nuanced and complex. Verbosity is something we correctly associate with intelligence but we also tend to confound the ability to experience emotions. And this may be a mistake.

I have been present when fledgling osprey took their very first flight, several times. It was always the female fledglings that flew first. The males were always behind. In August of 2019, at a well-established nest on a tidal river I watched a typical instance, this time with a striking difference. Both parents and their two fledglings (a female and a male) were on the nest. The moment the young female osprey flapped her wings and actually took flight, her father went with her. They made a wide arc around the nest, his great circle just outside hers and just behind her. All the while he gave a slow, measured version of his territorial challenge call. Both that flight pattern and the call that went with it were a warning: “The space wherein this fledgling flies belongs to me. Come near her, I will hurt you.”

All the while until she landed he watched over her, then landed alongside her.

It might seem cruel that osprey parents abruptly leave, resigning the young to their fate and without first teaching them to fish. But I now think that interpretation of abandonment is a function of our ignorance, not their indifference.

Mark Seth Lender is a producer for wildlife content at Living on Earth ( LOE.org ), the only program on US Public Radio exclusively dedicated to wildlife and environmental reporting.