On a windy afternoon earlier this week, Reese Lukei and Keriann Spiewak pushed off from a boat ramp along a branch of the Lynnhaven River.
Spiewak, senior trainer of animal ambassadors at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, and Lukei, a research associate with William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology, pulled out clipboards and binoculars and started scanning the shoreline.
They were on “Osprey Watch,” looking for some of Hampton Roads’ most beloved birds of prey.
Officials conduct the surveys each year to track the osprey population over time. This week’s was one of the first of the season.
Spiewak said the team looks for which nests are active and what’s inside to get baseline data. Then they’ll keep checking through July.
“If some of the nests have three eggs, and then we come back and they only have two chicks, we know somewhere they lost one of the chicks or an egg,” she said. “It just helps us understand the population.”
The Center for Conservation Biology launched the global Osprey Watch program in 2012 with the mission of using citizen science to collect widespread data "to be useful in addressing three of the most pressing issues facing aquatic ecosystems including global climate change, depletion of fish stocks and environmental contaminants.”
But the center has tracked the species locally for decades. Lukei has volunteered since 1974, when there were virtually no ospreys in the Lynnhaven River. That was the height of the “DDT era,” when the widely used pesticides severely suppressed osprey hatching.
In the early ‘80s, a few tree nests were spotted, Lukei said. The population has significantly grown since then. The most he’s seen was in 2019, with 102 nests in the Lynnhaven watershed.
Last year, they counted 42 active nests. Only about 16% of the babies survived.
“That’s about as bad as it gets,” Lukei said.
Historically, the Chesapeake Bay supported the world’s largest concentration of breeding ospreys. But scientists across the watershed have been ringing alarm bells in recent years.
Research out of the William & Mary center found ospreys were facing “nearly complete collapse” on the seaside of the Eastern Shore, and that chicks were starving in Mobjack Bay along the Middle Peninsula.
In Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, a majority of the osprey’s diet is made up of menhaden, a small, nutrient-dense fish.
Many researchers link osprey declines to the menhaden reduction industry, which harvests up to 112 million pounds of menhaden in the bay each year. But the industry strongly pushes back on that hypothesis, claiming there is no scientific evidence. Advocates continue to push for more research to settle the debate.
But the bay’s osprey population isn’t a monolith. Some areas fare better than others and for different reasons.
In the Lynnhaven, for example, “we're still trying to get a handle on exactly what's affecting the population,” Lukei said.
Menhaden seem to be abundant in the river, he said.
But the area has a growing crow issue, where mobs of the birds eat ospreys’ eggs or snatch chicks.
For the Osprey Watch survey, officials count nests they can see in trees along the shoreline. But they mostly focus on those set up on platforms along private docks.
Ospreys are “paranoid,” favoring open space with high visibility over forested areas, Lukei said.
When the team spies an adult osprey incubating atop a nest, they slowly boat over and raise a pole-mounted mirror to look inside.
Meanwhile, mother, and sometimes father, osprey fly off and circle around, making alarm calls.
On Tuesday, the group found 20 eggs across 16 nests in Broad and Linkhorn bays, plus some materials such as fishing line and a pool toy. (“Osprey are notorious junk collectors,” Spiewak said.)
They spotted several more nesting sites in trees, on a chimney and directly on top of a boat.
Later in the season, officials also place bands on some birds to track their movements.
Chicks usually start hatching in late May and early June. By August, ospreys are on their way back to South and Central America.
