Emergency Osprey Nest Surveys in Cape May, Wildwood and Stone Harbor

What you won’t hear on the news!!

by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager

It’s osprey season. Osprey Survey Season, that is. However, we never like to start the season off with these types of emergency surveys, but with the increase of strong storms and extreme straight line wind events, they are becoming an annual event. Ospreys nest on platforms in open areas near water, so their young can easily become victims during these types of storms. After receiving a text message from my colleague Kathy Clark yesterday evening about the intensity of the storms, she said we should try to do a survey of the affected areas. I had other plans but I knew that those could wait.

You see, I’ve done this before. Almost every year since 2012 when the derecho hit Absecon and wiped out half of the young osprey produced. Last year’s storm during this same time of year on Manahawkin Bay caused several young to be lost. Time is of the essence when this occurs. Most young are usually around 2-4 weeks now. We found young that were anywhere from 1 week old to 6 weeks old. Adults do not feed young when they are on the ground so if any were still alive then I knew we had to find them as soon as possible. So a plan was made and myself, co-worker Larissa Smith and her husband Matt, a long time dedicated volunteer and osprey bander set out to survey the entire area.

Lower Cape May County contains a huge number of osprey nests, especially in Wildwood, where the storm passed through. >>View all the nests in New Jersey. << We split up the area and launched our boats at each end. I took the south end in Cape May Harbor and Larissa and Matt took the north end of Wildwood at the public boat ramp. We motored throughout pretty every ditch, creek and channel in the back bays of the area and visited as many nests as we could. We ended up surveying 50 active nests. Of those 50 nest a total of 15 sustained damage from the storm. In some nests just the young were blown from the nest and others the whole top of the platform broke apart (most likely from the excess weight of nesting material on the platform). A total of 17 young were found dead on the ground. Three eggs fell to the ground when an entire platform broke apart. Some other nests were likely to have had young but there was no evidence of them at all (adults were still territorial and on the nest). It is hard to tell what actually killed the young that fell to the ground. We know they did not starve or were eaten. Our best guess is that the extreme downpours and flash flooding are likely to have caused their death on the ground. Without the adults to care for them they are very vulnerable to weather. On a positive note, one nestling was found alive!! It was placed back in it’s nest successfully. From all the nests that I checked most young did survive, 35 in total, so the damage was not too terrible.

It is hard to say how we can fix the problem. Some platforms were old and built with the not-optimal hardware (non-stainless screws) and others had huge amounts of nesting material. Either way, we will repair the platforms this summer so the pairs can rebuild in a timely manner (but it is too late to re-nest now), and we will clean off nests in the winter. In any Eagle Scout candidates are looking for a project then we’ve got one for you! 😉

Thanks for reading and please make a donation if you’d like to help support our Osprey Project. Here are photos from the surveys.