From its perch, an osprey keeps watch July 31 over the sixth hole on the Lake Course of the Chautauqua Golf Club, where an osprey family have taken up residence in a new nest near the green.
Chautauquans may have noticed a new landmark piercing up from the horizon at University Beach. Or perhaps they’ve noticed the new, blue sculpture that sits on the lawn of the Athenaeum Hotel. And maybe, if they’ve kept their eyes peeled on the greens of the Lake Course of Chautauqua Golf Club — whether on the sixth hole or, on a drive off the grounds, the 15th — they’ve spotted some of the creatures who are in the midst of their long-awaited return to Chautauqua.
Beginning in 2020, ospreys started returning to Chautauqua County for the first time since the species was nearly wiped out by the pesticide DDT between the 1950s and 1970s. The Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy installed a nesting pole for the birds at Loomis Goose Creek Preserve in 2015, eventually inviting back the first pair of ospreys, and has since worked to place six more around Chautauqua Lake as the county’s osprey population has continued to slowly grow.
A Washed Ashore Osprey Sculpture is installed July 11 on the Athenaeum Hotel lawn opposite Sports Club; the sculpture will be dedicated at 3:30 p.m. today.
This April, the Bird, Tree & Garden Club worked to build a nesting perch at University Beach. There’s also the Washed Ashore osprey sculpture that now sits permanently on the Athenaeum Hotel lawn across from Sports Club — which will be officially dedicated at 3:30 p.m. today — as a reminder of the animal that has become somewhat of an unofficial mascot of Chautauqua.
“This is the first time there was a bird that was really a success story in our county,” said Jeanne Wiebenga, vice chair of the board of directors of the CWC and BTG board member. “That was a very hopeful sign that conservation is really working.”
In the 1940s, DDT, a chemical pesticide originally used to combat the spread of malaria and typhus, came on the public market. Many families used it on their properties to kill insects, and it was used on a wide scale in many agricultural settings to remove pests from crops.
Environmental concerns about DDT were expressed by scientists as early as 1944, but a widespread movement to end the use of the pesticide did not begin until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which argued that chemical pesticides like DDT were having catastrophic effects on the environment, wildlife, and human health. Silent Spring became a bestseller, and ended up launching the modern environmental movement. DDT would ultimately be banned in 1972.
But the damage was already done — and the effects on the U.S. osprey population were devastating. Over time, DDT made its way into the digestive systems and bloodstreams of ospreys through their consumption of other animals; the chemical would be eaten by an insect that was eaten by a fish that was then eaten by an osprey, for example. The DDT would then weaken the calcium metabolism in the ospreys, leading them to produce weak, thinly-shelled and often infertile eggs, resulting in the population dropping to less than 16,000 individuals — with none left in Chautauqua County.
“In 1972 … (DDT) had almost almost completely annihilated the bald eagles and the ospreys,” Wiebenga said. “After 1972 they slowly began to return, but mostly on the East Coast and on the West Coast. It was not until around 2015 … that the first offspring was seen in this part of the country.”
Ospreys are raptors characterized by their massive range, distinctive color patterns, impressive hunting abilities, and unique diet — they are piscivores, meaning they almost exclusively consume fish. And they hunt fish with remarkable effectiveness, successfully catching a fish one in every four diving attempts, usually taking only 12 minutes to find their meal. They can also spot fish from hundreds of feet in the air, and they are able to adjust their diving patterns according to the refraction of the water, allowing them to dive almost directly on top of their chosen fish as high as 70% of the time.
Ospreys are also found on all six of the inhabited continents; there aren’t any on Antarctica, “but who knows, with climate change,” Wiebenga quipped. They prefer nesting very high above the ground, in open areas that allow for easy approach at higher speeds. That is why the CWC and BTG, along with other conservation organizations around the county, have started building osprey nesting platforms. The platforms, like those seen at University Beach or on the golf course, are often built using the materials of unused utility or telephone poles. The structures are Y-shaped, and have a circular or square-shaped platform where the ospreys can actually build their nests — which can sometimes be large enough for a human to comfortably sit inside of.
In Chautauqua, the first of these nesting platforms was built in 2015. But the platform at Loomis Goose Creek Preserve would sit vacant for five years. It wasn’t until 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that anyone started noticing some action at the nesting platform.
“The road was very quiet, there was almost no traffic between Jamestown and Mayville. … Nobody went shopping, nobody went to work,” Wiebenga recalled. “Maybe that was a signal to some ospreys to say, ‘Well this sounds like a nice place to settle.’ ”
For the first time in half a century, ospreys were back in Chautauqua County. Wiebenga, who spent her career as a doctor, became somewhat of an amateur expert on the raptors as she spent time photographing their triumphant return to Western New York — a season-long installation of her osprey photography called the Athenaeum Hotel lobby home in 2022. Notably, she helped set up a camera on the nesting platform at Loomis Goose Creek Preserve that took hundreds of photos of the birds each day, allowing the CWC to monitor their progress and make important observations.
The camera has observed that it’s been the same ospreys returning to the same nest year after year — and those same ospreys have been having babies. In 2023, the mating pair, named Femke and Hauke, had three babies. At the end of their time in the northeast, where ospreys come for breeding, the osprey couple will return, children in tow, to South America, where they will stay until next year. And, in a couple of years, their babies will hopefully follow them back to Chautauqua.
Since Femke and Hauke first arrived in 2020, the osprey population has grown to include at least 18 individuals, and the CWC has observed nine new ospreys being born, as well.
The most exciting thing, Wiebenga said, is that once the ospreys are here, they will continue coming back and continue having babies, so Chautauqua’s osprey population will continue to slowly rise. Considering there wasn’t a single osprey in the area for nearly 50 years, that’s no small feat.
“It’s just so spectacular that they go away, and that we can trust them to come back a year later, at the same time and do the whole thing all over again,” Wiebenga said. “To raise three chicks is an enormous job, and to raise them from a tiny little fluff ball to an adult sized bird in just eight weeks — you can’t imagine what a big task that is, and they do it faithfully, dutifully, every year. Then they go away, and then they come back. They spend the winter apart, and they come back. There is something so incredibly wonderful about that, that faithfulness to their natural rhythm. We just love it.”
