Mrs Perfect on the Nest 5 perch, after losing her chicks.
2024 – What I Knew Then, What I Know Now – 2026
Mrs. Perfect auditioned intruders and accepted a second Mr. Perfect the end of March. He was pretty perfect about Osprey male performance on all counts I could see. Two chicks were bobbing above the nest lip by June 11 but didn’t survive past July 8, the date of the photo above.
I don’t believe Mrs. Perfect returned after losing a clutch for the second year in a row. Now the new Mr. Perfect auditioned and fairly quickly had a new female for the nest. The names remained with the nest but are henceforth no longer accurately descriptive of the Osprey pair.
Beyond the five nests in front of the island house, the telescope reached the lips of four others. Hatchling heads had bobbed in three. Then they did not. None had appeared in the fourth. Heat got tagged the culprit, abetting dehydration, a constant threat from the ever dwindling size of the also dwindling numbers of fish reaching the Ospreys’ nests.
Ospreys who had remained paired through the back-to-back years of nest failures fiddled with their nests for another few weeks and then, again, migrated early.
Although Ethel and Mr. Bennet had abandoned their egg in Nest 2, neither abandoned the nest.
Mr. Bennet took to constructing an increasingly inaccessible nest, difficult to land or perch upon. Nevertheless, Ethel treated Nest 2 as her property as well as Nest 1. She called for fish from Nest 2 and from Mark-8’s pier. This produced no immediate results.
I think she spent much of her time in the South Copse, a stand of tall pines the other side of the creek mouth that stretched to the river. I had suspected Mark-6 settled there after abandoning Marker 6 as a nesting platform as well as abandoning Marker 3, which has structural selling points but also a blinking light at its center, perhaps why numerous past attempts failed at producing an active nest.
As the summer wore on, Mr. B began giving Ethel fish again.
In 2022, Mr. B had fed Mrs. B, bite by bite, unhelpful and endearing. Mrs. B took each bite from him, turned and fed it to a hatchling, probably their bully. Watching had felt more intrusive than watching them mate.
In 2024, a telescope wasn’t needed to follow Mr. B’s endearing and somewhat unhelpful building of a nest approximating the shape of a beehive. He sky-danced above it, spiraling and squeeing. But it didn’t matter. Any interested female would be chased off by Ethel.
So Mr. Bennet remained my favorite, long-suffering on top of many merits. He added to his nest through early September when he migrated.
His nest lasted the winter to greet him in the spring. And, of course, greet Ethel as well.
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