Birdwatching: Raising Osprey in Montana

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Outside Magazine February 2004

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Natural Acts
Birds on a Wire
Sex. Danger. Family values. This backyard soap opera has it all—plus feathers, razor-sharp talons, and a neighborhood obsessed.

By Bill Vaughn


	(Photograph from Corel)

SLOUCHING AROUND IN STEEL-SHANKED BOOTS, smoking Luckies, and showing off their tattoos, the guys were built along the heroic lines of NFL players. The chicks were scruffy, infested with bugs, and, for the time being, homeless. This was a critical moment in the lives of these two osprey babies. Because the chicks' parents had nested on a 40-foot power pole, NorthWestern Energy had dispatched four linemen, three supervisors, and a utility-company biologist named Sam Milodragovich to move the ospreys' home to a safer spot.

First a lineman went up in a cherry picker, brought the chicks to the ground in a Bud Light box lined with a cotton shirt, and laid them in the dewy grass. The defenseless and stressed-out nestlings—the one I named Sissy was the size of a large Cornish game hen, her brother, Sonny, the size of a small one—were gulping air. Without their mama to open her six-foot wingspan and shield them from the June sun, they were beginning to overheat.

The cherry picker went up again, and the lineman looped ropes beneath the nest, a bagel-shaped cup four feet across, woven from cottonwood branches and padded with wheatgrass. I looked heavenward and crossed my fingers. Sissy and Sonny's parents were flapping in angry gyres above the abduction, and shrieking with rage. Although they could have attacked, their formidable black talons arching to gouge an eye or rip a jugular, this ape was just too big. I had named Duke and Doreen the summer before, when I'd watched them raise two sons in a massive ponderosa at the edge of the Clark Fork River, which runs along the western boundary of our land, and I felt bad about their anguish.

Just as the nest was lifted from the pole, my neighbor, a sculptor who owns the 12-acre parcel of forest and swamp next to ours, appeared. She looked down at the chicks and up at their parents, and burst into tears. But, as Milodragovich explained, the utility had no choice—the nest couldn't stay where it was, even if moving it meant wrecking it, then rebuilding it as best they could.

Like many osprey couples along the Clark Fork here in western Montana, where logging and development have deprived these melodramatic birds of the old-growth pines they prefer, Duke and Doreen had built on a feeder pole radiating wires in four directions. It was highly likely that when it rained, electricity would arc from the wires and into the wet nest, broasting the birds, shutting off the juice to all the houses in this backwater, a three-hour float from Missoula, and maybe starting a ground fire. Besides that, utilities are required by federal and state laws to alter distribution equipment that threatens to fry raptors.

So the company's soldiers planted a 45-foot pole with a four-foot wooden platform on top to anchor the nest, and a nine-foot crossbeam jutting out from under the platform. This way Duke and Doreen would have a place to take off and land when Sonny and Sissy got rambunctious a month down the road.

Looking at these beleaguered chicks, I couldn't imagine they'd last long enough to learn how to fly. But I'm one of those bleeding hearts who believes that nature disturbed is nature ruined. Concerned, I began a reconnaissance of this bird family that would become a consuming preoccupation. For me, a long summer of fretting, hand-wringing, and lessons learned had just begun.

Lesson number one was this: Contrary to rural legend, ruthless hunters such as ospreys don't abandon their young just because some guy in a hard hat touched them—no birds do, for that matter. After all, Pandion haliaetus, bearing the genes of predatory dinosaurs, has thrived virtually unchanged for 15 million years, becoming the planet's ultimate airborne angler and colonizing six continents. As recently as a million years ago (or maybe last year), the ancestor of the hard hat was eating things he found in his ear.

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Contributing editor Bill Vaughn is the author of First, a Little Chee-Chee (Arrow Graphics).

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