2025 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026
I didn’t think 2025 would arrive so quickly. I can delay its news with two romantic spring tales. For one, Mark-8 and Ethel met up at Nest 1. But this time when Ethel hopped back to Nest 2 and Mr. Bennet, Mark-8 persisted. Mark-8 won her back and banished Mr. B.
Ethel retained possession of Nest 1 and Nest 2.
For the other, a new, young couple, Lily and LB, took possession of the Bigs’ abandoned Nest 4 and also took Nest 3 from George.
There’s a bit more to those tales, here and there, but most the rest is mere real estate tittle tattle. The only actual news boils down to this, the Ospreys on St. George Island abandoned their eggs the second half of May 2025.
That ended the real estate shortage, the population crisis quenched. And 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 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.
The enduring melodrama of Mark-8 and Ethel included a clutch of eggs in 2025. They’d both incubated, in their extraordinarily casual manners, which might never have produced a chick. Nevertheless, they’d laid them late and remained some days beyond the general abandonment. Then they also left. A Seagull got those eggs.
In the absence of either Perfect parent, a big Gull swallowed an entire egg standing in the Perfects’ nest.
What I wondered, in addition to the rest of such strangeness, was, Where were all the Gulls?
For decades after my children were actual children, scores of marauding 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.
Then, I could not remember how long since that had happened. Years? Certainly. A decade? Probably. More? Likely. Because, really. where are all the Gulls?
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