One day last summer, my son-in-law, Randy Sapp, excitedly told me that while sitting on his boat dock, he had observed an eagle do a power dive into the lake: “It was an amazing site. The eagle folded his wings and plunged straight into the water and disappeared. Then he suddenly reappeared, flapping his wings and becoming airborne again with a good-size fish between his feet.”
I hated to “bust Randy’s bubble,” as today’s younger generation would term it, but I suggested that rather than an eagle, Randy had probably witnessed an osprey, which is often mistaken for an eagle. Randy’s reaction to this comment was a half smile that I have come to recognize as a polite disagreement – you know – such as when we debate whether a worm is more effective when trailed behind a Lake Clear Wabbler than a streamer fly. Or what type of wax to use on a given winter-day ski tour. You get the picture – important man things. We will worry about the world situation, etc., some other time. There are priorities, after all.
I decided to go to a neutral corner and quickly explained that a prominent biologist friend of mine once told me that he was careful in scientific queries in using the words never or always. In other words, it could have been an eagle, even though they do not ordinarily submerge in obtaining fish. Do they never exhibit this behavior? Do they always just pick up injured or dead fish or fish close to the surface? In other words, Randy could be correct. Perhaps it was an eagle despite the odds that the behavior he witnessed would suggest, in all probability, it was an osprey. After all, even seasoned birders sometimes confuse the two birds, especially when they soar overhead and are observed in flight.
But hey, what the heck? It was a thrilling sight, something not observed every day. So what if it wasn’t an eagle? Ospreys, like eagles, are majestic birds – a sign when we see them here that we live in a very special place, a place where the waters thus far have remained pure, and creatures like the osprey and eagle can find proper habitat and raise their young to the continued enjoyment of us homo sapiens and our future generations.
There have been many literary tributes to both of these majestic birds. Tennyson’s two stanzas below refer presumably to the sea eagle, but they might well have been addressed to our native birds:
He
clasps the crag with
crooked
hands;
Close
to the sun
in
lonely lands
Ring’d
with the azure
world
he stands
The wrinkled sea
beneath him crawls;
He watches from
his mountain walls,
and like a thunder-bolt
he falls.
As most readers are aware, the osprey is fairly common here, readily seen hunting along the Racquette River corridor. A number of their nests can be seen near ponds in the Massawepi area and, of course, practically every pond in the St. Regis chain of lakes has a conspicuous, bulky nest of sticks and grass usually on the top of a tall pine and generally so situated that a wide view of the surrounding country can be seen.
In the recent April issue of Audubon magazine is a short article concerning the osprey, a portion of which I have taken the liberty to reproduce in today’s column with the hope it will be of interest to Transition readers:
When northern lakes and estuaries are still rimmed with ice, the osprey – a.k.a. the fish hawk – welcomes spring with a shrill, ascending kyew, kyew, kyew. On every continent, save Antarctica, you’ll see these white-crowned, black-masked raptors hovering over water or perched on stick nests that can weight 1,000 pounds. Note the slightly crooked wings that can span six feet, the long legs and the aerial acrobatics of courting males. Ospreys will take the odd mink, muskrat or snake, but their diet is almost exclusively fish. Spines on footpads and a front claw that swivels to the back assist in gripping their slippery prey. Oil in the feathers repels water. Ospreys hit the surface in an explosive spray, closing their nostrils (unlike bald eagle who can submerge completely); then they rise laboriously, shaking like a dog. If they’ve been successful, they’ll immediately turn the fish so the head points forward. Sometimes an osprey will strike a fish that’s too big for it and, unable to release its talons, will down.