I didn’t think 2025 would arrive so quickly. I can delay the news with two romantic spring tales. For one, Mark-8 and Ethel met up at Nest 1, then Ethel hopped back to Nest 2 and Mr. Bennet. But Mark-8 persisted, won her back, and banished Mr. B.
Ethel retained possession of Nest 1 and Nest 2.
Another tale, a new, young couple, Lily and Little Boy, took possession of the Bigs’ abandoned Nest 4 and also took Nest 3 from George.
But the rest is mere real estate tittle tattle. The only news boils down to this, all the Ospreys on St. George Island abandoned their eggs in May.
That ended the real estate shortage. The population crisis looked to be over.
The catastrophe stretched up the Potomac, only subsiding as the river approached Washington, DC, which reported a boom year for Osprey fledglings.
But online nests in New Jersey and Australia also experienced unexpected abandonment of eggs that parents had incubated to within a week or two of their hatching range. It felt like a DDT flashback.
Note: Charter boat and conservation organizations have long blamed huge trawlers in the Atlantic for taking too many menhaden, the mainstay food of Ospreys and also Rockfish, a popular Chesapeake sport and commercial Bass. Current regulatory wrangling is following the historic tradition of wildlife preservation, indeed all conservation efforts, and many people are meeting about how too little, too late, if at all has been done.
In the absence of either Perfect parent, I watched a big gull swallow an entire egg standing in the Perfects’ nest. What I wondered was, Where are all the gulls?
For decades gulls had stopped my breath, turned my blood cold, peppered summers with screams of “maw-maw-maw” sounding for all the world like a child calling desperately for me.
The 2025 episode of the enduring melodrama of Mark-8 and Ethel included a clutch of eggs they’d both incubated, in their extraordinarily casual manners, which might never have produced a chick. Regardless, they’d laid them late, remained some days beyond the general abandonment, then left. A gull got those eggs, too.
Really. Where were all the gulls?
Previous Episode 2024-4: Weather Suspected
Upcoming Episode 2025-2: Young Female Overturns Tradition
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