A lot has happened since last week at this time, and it’s been good and bad. The bad: Ricky, the first Osprey nestling to fledge, has disappeared. How he’ll exist is a mystery. The good: Ricky’s siblings, David and Lucy, have fledged and are flying gleefully all around the Great Cove area, shouting with joy over the discovery of what they were meant to do. They seem to still consider their nest home and have been returning to it. Here’s David beginning one of his test flights at fairly close range (if you have a big lens):
Lucy, the youngest and smallest, seems to follow David when she can; she also begs when he sneaks away alone. Here’s Lucy practicing a landing from on-high:
Their takeoffs and landings in the nest aren’t precise yet, which can cause scrambles and head-to-head confrontations.
Their landings on branches often are comically awkward, especially when they get caught in a spruce tree or try to balance on a bouncing thin branch and must keep their wings out for stability.
We haven’t seen either sibling trying to fish yet, but we expect that any day. (Researchers have concluded that Ospreys are not taught to fish by their parents; they hunt instinctively like most, if not all, raptors.) While they’re getting up the nerve to fish, their parents do it for them, slapping down a wriggling fish into the nest on a regular basis.
Those parents, Ozzie and Harriet, don’t spend much time on the nest now, but Harriet usually is visibly nearby, sometimes circling the nest:
Ozzie usually is the one that delivers fresh fish to the nest, but he often acts as a sentinel, sitting in a nearby spruce top and warning other raptors that come too close of the family’s air space:
While the youngsters are almost as large as their parents, it is easy to tell the juvenile Ospreys (white-patterned backs and bronze eyes) from the adults (non-patterned backs and yellow eyes). The next step is for the youngsters to learn to fish, then they’ll be ready to migrate south in September. (Brooklin, Maine).