The first wave of ospreys has arrived and, sure enough, good-old-reliable Ozzie was among them. He stayed hunkered down on his nest alone yesterday during a very gusty morning. The high winds were ruffling his head feathers and creating a few whitecaps in Great Cove below him.
Northern-migrating ospreys usually return to the same nests that they build and constantly decorate and repair over the years. Many older males seem to come first to secure their nests and are followed shortly thereafter by their mates-for-life. Based on his markings, I’m almost certain that this is the same Ozzie whom readers of these posts have come to know and love. We’ll be reporting regularly on these birds and their offspring until early fall, when the ospreys leave us for warmer climes.
As many of you know, our protocol for interesting narration is to call our returning mature male “Ozzie,” the mature female “Harriet,” the first-born “David” and the second-born “Ricky” – just like in the old sitcom TV show about a happy, attractive, and talented family.
(The sexes of the immature birds have to be assumed. We sometimes can tell the sex of mature ospreys by appearance alone in situations where the larger size of females is apparent. The sexes of adults do become evident during mating [who’s on top] and long-term brooding [who stays in the nest to brood and be fed].)
There always has been a third-born in this nest, whom we call by the month of her birth, usually “June.” There only has been one fourth-born that I’ve seen in this nest, but she was bullied by her much-larger siblings and eventually thrown out of the nest by them. It turns out that the real family life of birds of prey is not a sitcom. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 16, 2025.)