Tag: Martha

After Mark-8 threw her off Nest 1, Ethel settled into Nest 2 and Mr. Bennet brought her fish. Then Mark-8 brought a new female to Nest 1. Ethel freaked out. She flew between Nest 2 and Marker 8 over and over and over. Mr. B finally calmed her with more fish.

The new female settled into Nest 1. Ethel laid an egg in Nest 2. Mark-8 dive bombed Ethel as she incubated. Henceforth, New Female followed every time Ethel left Nest 2; followed her out, followed her back. A few times New Female dive bombed Ethel on Nest 2, as Mark-8 had done.

Mr. Bennet and Ethel failed to form a commitment.

Mr. B split a day or two before Mother’s Day when Ethel left Nest 2 long enough for two Canada geese to stomp flat anything inside before going on their way. Ethel split the next day. Thus began something akin to the musical chairs game.

Mr. B returned a few days later to a whirl of popularity, including food begging from Mark-8’s New Female.

Ethel reappeared, shooed New Female and Yet Another female off Nest 2. She and Mr. B tried again to commit. Mr. B tried again to dump her. But Ethel never severed ties with a male who had once delivered fish.

And Ethel had laid an egg in Nest 2, which has appeared to Osprey observers to impart a sense of proprietorship. Mr. B appeared to accept Ethel’s presence in his nest as legitimate, though he no longer treated her as a mate, he also didn’t try to push her off.

I named Mark-8’s new mate, a bit awkward, like your friend’s ex-husband’s new wife. They’d laid no eggs but they lasted the season. Plus, I wanted to try out my new nomenclature. I named her NF1 for New Female, Nest 1.

In weird 2024, it had seemed the right time to funnel into an Excel doc my variously detailed (and not) observations regarding the 10 Ospreys I’d named. As I’ve done regarding everything for my entire life, the notes were jotted on paper scraps, my phone, in  blah-blah-blah yuk on the laptop, even in quasi organized logs in random and unorganized notebooks.

Previous Episode: 2024-1: A Population Blip
Next Episode: 2024.3:  A Nest Too Far

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.

Previous Episode 2023.3:  Mrs. Bennet Guts It Out

Next Episode  2024-2: Good for the Gander

Ethel waits patiently for Mark-8 to abandon his efforts at seduction.

When Mrs. Bennet split upon the arrival of Ethel back to Island Creek, Ethel took the opportunity to fly right into Nest 2 that Mrs. B had abandoned. Nearly immediately, Ethel began fighting a female intruder hopping between Nest 1 and Nest 2.

Mr. Bennet did not engage in the battle, he perched at the lip of his Nest 2 and let Ethel handle the pushing and shoving.

Note: Ospreys more enthusiastically remove an intruder of their own gender than the opposite, but they will ultimately get rid of any intruder imposing upon their territory.

Mark-8 wasn’t anywhere to be seen. And when the intruding female hopped to Nest 1, Ethel fought her off that nest  as well. But Ethel mostly remained on Nest 2. She allowed Mr. B to mount her a few times and presented him with the same noncompliant behavior she’d given Mark-8.

By shifting her weight, Ethel could knock a male off balance and sometimes off her back entirely. Often that was the end of matters. When she leaned forward with a flat back, flat as a tabletop, she did not drop her head or lift her tail. Flat. When matters chanced to reach the stage of tail swishing, every view I caught, suggested she swished counterpoint to the needs of the male’s flailing tail.

Mr. Bennet, who had been happily mating away with Mrs. Bennet, had been abandoned by his preferred mate, twice, and was now being messed with by the bird who’d possibly caused it. He went fishing.

 

He returned with his fish and ate it all, perched atop the Dock Pole, where he could look down into Nest 2, not 50 feet away. He ate the fish as he watched Ethel beg from the nest below. When he’d finished the fish he left and returned with another fish and did it again. And then he did it all yet again.

The day after Mr. B’s solo fish feast, on April 1, Mrs. Bennet returned and sent the females packing, which included not only Ethel but the recently arrived Martha. Although George had also returned, Martha hadn’t yet touched down on the hot mess of his beloved Purple Martin hotel.

Previous episode 2023-2: Big Mama Attacked

Next Episode 2023.3  Mrs. Bennet Guts It Out

2023 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026

The Bennets and Perfects arrived even earlier than the previous year. Big Mama arrived  March 18, Big Daddy two days later, they were mating by March 21.

On March 26, far from the first time this season, Big Mama rocketed into the air to repulse an intruder. They became entangled and dropped into the water still intertwined. The intruder flew practically at the moment of the splash.

Big Mama floated beneath her nest, head up and wings outstretched, surely no more than two or three minutes. It felt an hour watching. She struggled and failed to pull herself out of the water twice, every feather drenched, even her head, she’d clearly completely submerged. She lifted free on her third try and reached her nest. She had a brightly bleeding gash down her breast.

She healed within a month to no apparent ill effect, wasn’t so fierce and stopped rocketing off her nest.

The Perfects and Bennets further than ever ahead of schedule, arrived the first week of March. Fishing was stupendous. I watched Mr. B deliver a fish in each foot mid-March. Later that day the male on the nest to the north of the Perfects did the same.

Fish, tall pines, scores of man-made platforms continued to draw youngsters, this year’s from successful “Chesapeake” imprinted fledge classes of ’20 and ’21.

Measured birds per square foot, St. George Island really might have been the Osprey Capital of the World.

The day Big Mama got slashed, Mark-8 made his dramatic arrival, streaking out of the water bushes at the shore and smashing an intruder off Nest 1.

At that eruption next door, Mrs. Bennet split and didn’t return to her Nest 2 until the next day. And then refused to resume the mating regiment of the past three weeks with Mr. Bennet. She relented the next day, March 28, the same day Ethel returned. And Mrs. B split again.

Previous Episode 2022-5:  Ethel Was Liberated

Next Episode 2023-2: Ethel Remains Liberated

Ethel, in the nest, and Mark-8 perched above, don’t seem to be really into one another.

2022 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026

Osprey dung had become an obvious problem by 2022. It eats the paint off cars, porches, everything. A windshield count identified 60 nests on the island, add a conservative third again for nests invisible from the road and those invisible staring straight at them.

The Captain, again, proclaimed St. George Island the Osprey Capital of the World.

Even so, only two of the four nests out front creek fledged Ospreys that year. Ethel brooded a few days in April, abandoned that effort. In June, as eggs in Island Creek nests started hatching, Ethel and Mark-8 hunkered a second time for some serious incubation. Lasted a week. Ethel split when fish deliveries halted. She returned after geese spent a few hours stomping anything in the bottom of that nest to smithereens.

Mark-6 continued to slide sticks down triangular Marker 6 and visited Nests 1 and 2 when the males were absent. Twice I saw Mrs. B and Mark-6 breezily land side by side on Nest 2, like they’d just flown in from grabbing a quick drink. Mark-6 loitered briefly, Mrs. B was friendly, he flew off.

Likely Ethel’s chasing Mark-6 off her nest was actually following him into the South Copse. Although I hadn’t realized, in 2022, Ethel had returned from wintering in Central America as a free agent.

On July 12, the same day, Mr. B gave Mrs. B a fish to welcome her return, Mark-8 gave a fish to Ethel. There was a full moon, daylight hours waning, fishing had picked up, for whatever it’s worth.

Mark-8 had begun eating his fish on a low pier very near Nest 1. Ethel’s best chance for a piece was to wait in the nest. If she dropped down to the pier, he flew with his fish. The gulls, his ever present sentinels, cleaned up the pier. Once, with Ethel watching and calling, Mark-8 left a chunk of fish on the pier. The gulls were on it before his talons left the planking.

Both remained committed to that nest, still battling as allies against any intruders eyeing Nest 1.

The Osprey population increased every year, real estate naturally grew scarcer, and the trend continued into 2023. That season will have barely begun when an intruder rips Big Mama’s chest open, leaving her floating in the creek.

Previous Episode:  2022-4: Best to Lay by Early May

Upcoming Episode: 2023-1: Big Mama Attacked

Mr Bennet preferred the electric pole on the road to dine and to prepare a fish for nest delivery. He can see activity in Nests 1 and 2 from the pole, and probably action in nests across the creek to the south.

2022 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026

 

The Bennets controlled territory beyond Nest 2. At least two loblollies in the middle of Parcel 157 Copse across the road belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet; all four man-made poles surrounding the oyster house belonged to Mr. Bennet, and all the pilings along the lower side of the pier belonged to Mrs. Bennet. She selected her dining spot among them, perhaps based upon vessel configurations. Regardless, except for Mr. B, she allowed no other Osprey to perch on any of them.

Upon George’s arrival, the Bennets made clear that their territorial jurisdiction covered the entire pier, including the pilings on the upper side and the toe at the bottom of the “L,” where George was constructing his split-level nest.

The Bennet’s swooping and diving and squeeing opposition did not come close to the vigor of the Bigs’ hostility, their tenor reflected outrage of ancestral proportion against unpardonable nouveau.

Then again, for all I know, George’s installation at the end of the pier amounted to Osprey voodoo. Watermen avoided it.

Most likely George’s effrontery, squeezing between established territories, shoved property rights straight up those males’ beaks. Even Mr. Perfect, whose boundary lines were not impacted, joined the attacks.

Mrs. B and Big Mama stuck tight on their nests but rocketed into the air if Martha flew overhead, which usually Martha did not. At the first sign of aggression, Martha split, flew across the creek. When the locals came at George she’d absent herself, quick to leave the Purple Martin hotel to any invader.

Martha liked George to deliver her fish to pilings across the creek. And mating worked better on the pilings than George’s hot-mess nests of ’22. Martha did hang in the neighborhood, perched around the expanding split-level. But the only risk I ever saw her take was getting caught investigating other nests. When nest owners were absent — and the nests were empty of eggs or chicks — she’d hop in and look around.

But George did not abandon his split-level. Certainly not after holding his claim against the elder males. When matters calmed, Martha stood on the Purple Martin hotel, walked among George’s circular collection on the pier, and particularly liked perching on crossbars between a few pilings around the pier’s foot.

Neither George or Martha ventured farther up the pier than the foot. They’d additionally been granted five loblollies in my side yard, which, as the Osprey flies, is a straight shot off the toes to the trees, no invasion of airspace above the leg of the pier. Even so, Mrs. B left her early eggs. It was touch and go all season if she’d stick with Nest 2. She never did dine again on a piling along the oyster house pier.

Previous Episode: 2022-2: Building Code Spat
Upcoming Episode: 2022-4: Best to Lay by Early May

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2022 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026

In 2022 the fledge classes of 2019 and 2020 roared into town, as obstreperous as ever the old Gang of Six. Youngsters canvased Island Creek through the summer, dipping into nests to attempt a claim, some ready to fight then and there.

Mark-8 and Ethel remained adamant about their possession of Nest 1, although neither were into nestorations. They persevered as non-traditionalists. Mark-8 wasn’t into fish delivery. And Ethel wasn’t into mating.

When Mark-8 zoomed in for a mating attempt—an approach favored by most lower-creek males—he’d have to walk Ethel’s shoulders down to force her tail up. If he succeeded with that, he’d have to walk his way back up to position his tail beneath hers. If all of this was accomplished, Ethel would swish her tail like she was all in, but whenever I caught a glimpse, she was all out of alignment.

Note: Ornithologists say Osprey do not trade fish for copulation, not in a tit for tat kind of way. The male necessity is to override his own survival instinct and give his fish away. So, while the giving is a huge thing, possibly even tied to his perception of masculinity, the female needs to calculate, Is it enough? He must feed her, her chicks, and himself. A miscalculation could trap her into a lifetime of begging calls and drudgery.

A new couple arrived in mid-April. I named them George and Martha for no reason at all. George began building a split-level atop a Purple Martin hotel rusted hollow. It was mounted at the toe of the L-shaped pier that separated the old Osprey nests from the new.

While George’s efforts sometimes appeared within the realm of possibility, they also smacked of the style of Mark-6, who in 2022 continued sliding sticks down Marker 6. George incorporated the sticks that fell off the Purple Martin hotel into the circle of rope, fabric, and various detritus comprising the garden level of his castle sprawled across the pier.

Just like that, the Bennets got another atypical neighbor, this couple flanking them on the north.

None of the neighborhood took it well.

Previous episode: 2022-1: Time Speeds Up

Upcoming episode 2022-3:  Territorial Negotiations