2024 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026
Note: Pine borer beetles are always with us, arborists explain, but healthy trees fight them off. Trees stressed by drought, salt water intrusion, or soil compaction will lose.
By 2024, the pine borers on St. George Island had been at it a quarter century, quietly thinning the copses one or two spindly loblollies at a time, such as in the foreground above. Gaps had started to show among the pines on the lower side of the island. Among the trees shone towering skeletons of trunks and branches stripped of bark and bleached white as bone. Turned out the beetles had been thinning the copses to death.
Something else. In 2024, the Osprey population of St. George Island probably wasn’t the largest ever for probably the first time since the outlawing of DDT in 1972. For one, Mrs. Bennet didn’t return. Neither did Mr. Perfect. Which, in retrospect, might explain why the earliest early birds didn’t arrive early: Mrs. Perfect on March 12 and Mr. Bennet not until April 7.
Ethel arrived the day after Mrs. Perfect and immediately began soliciting for a new mate, which she got. He delivered sticks and fish to the nest until Mark-8 showed up a couple weeks later and threw him off.
Ethel had watched from Nest 2, not yet occupied, and returned promptly to Nest 1 once Mark-8 banished her suitor. Then Ethel and Mark-8 had an interlude. He sky-danced above her. They mated. He delivered lots of fish, which Ethel carried to Nest 2 to dine upon. Mark-8 brought sticks to Nest 1. They even got broody, hunkering down as if incubating. Until Mr. Bennet returned on April 7.
Ethel stayed on Nest 1, called for fish as usual, until the sun went down. Unusual was that Mark-8 also remained all day on Nest 1, watching Mr. B instead of fishing.
By the end of his arrival day, Mr. Bennet had brought numerous fresh sticks to Nest 2 and eaten three fish on his traditional Dining Pole, nothing like the hovering Dock Pole, but still an unobstructed view of Nests 1 and 2 as he dined.
Mark-8 fished the next morning and ate his entire fish on the small pier by Nest 1 as Ethel called. Once Mark-8 had swallowed the fishtail, Ethel jumped to Nest 2.
She hopped from one nest to the other all day, begging from the nest of whichever male was in the neighborhood with a fish. She once allowed Mr. B to mate, which did not produce a fish. She was uncooperative at his second attempt.
She headed home to Nest 1 in the afternoon and Mark-8 kicked her out, by which I mean, lifted his talons in the air and shoved them against her back and sent her overboard.
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