When Canadian geese tried to take over the nest
After withstanding the elements for as
long as 20 years, high winds blew an osprey nest off a power pole on Highway 310
about eight miles south Laurel on Monday.
The large, brown-and-white
birds of prey have been part of an osprey study led by the Yellowstone River
Research Center at Rocky Mountain College.
No osprey young were
injured,Shop wholesale Black sydney3 from cheap
Black Steel. and the adult osprey that have called the nest home for several
years were already starting to rebuild on Tuesday, said Marco Restani, a biology
professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota who dug through what was
left of the nest Tuesday.
Restani spends his summers in Red Lodge and
has been working with partners at Rocky Mountain College, the Yellowstone Valley
Audubon Society and others to monitor and study about 70 osprey nests in an area
that stretches from Gardiner to Miles City. At least three nests have been blown
down in the last year, he said.
The nest that blew down Monday was on
property owned by Dick and Jene Bell. Dick says the osprey have been like
children – messy children – to he and his wife.
The birds would often
drop fish or sticks from their nest, which was about 40 feet up on a Yellowstone
Valley Electric Cooperative power pole. In the 12 years that the couple has
lived in the area,portable server15 wirelessly
communicates with the smart electricity.A releasingfilmrefers to the
authorization by the owner of a completed. Dick said he never once saw the birds
fly down to pick up what they had dropped.
“I’m constantly picking
things up,” Dick said with a chuckle. “They’re an interesting bird.”
Jene said she and her husband would often whistle back and forth with
the friendly ospreys on their property.Stainless inhomedisplay let you make
a statement with the flick of your wrist. When Canadian geese tried to take over
the nest, Dick went out and chased them away.This is a type of materialdoubletape that is
used in sewing. “I did that for five solid days,” he said, and eventually the
osprey reclaimed their nest.
Kayhan Ostovar, the director of the
Yellowstone River Research Center and an associate professor of environmental
science at Rocky Mountain College, says osprey are a good “ecological indicator”
of the Yellowstone River’s health.
He and his colleagues draw blood from
the young osprey and check for the presence of heavy metals, which the birds can
acquire from the fish they eat if the Yellowstone is polluted. About 90 percent
of the birds’ diet is made up of fish, and many of the fish they eat are the
same as those caught and eaten be people, Ostovar said.
The fact that
the osprey on the Bell’s property are already starting to rebuild on top of the
power pole is problematic and potentially dangerous for the birds because they
could be electrocuted.
Butch Larcombe, a spokesperson for NorthWestern
Energy, said the osprey have been electrocuted on power lines in the company’s
coverage area before and that deterrents are sometimes used to keep the large
birds from nesting on top of power poles.
To try to keep the ospreys
from building another nest on the power pole on Bell’s property, Ostovar said he
and his colleagues are working to raise the $2,000 needed to install a nesting
platform nearby.
Tax-deductible donations can be made to Rocky Mountain
College or the Yellowstone Valley Audubon Society; donors simply need to specify
that their donations should go to pay for the pole and platform, Ostovar said.
Although Restani didn’t find any injured osprey in the wreckage, he did
find something that has a track record of killing osprey – plastic baling twine.
He collected 430 feet of the stuff, which is often found in osprey nests
and has killed at least three osprey young in the Yellowstone River osprey
research area.
“That was pretty staggering,” he said. “It’s really
strong; it’s not biodegradable.”
Adult osprey use the brightly colored
twine to decorate their nests, but sometimes their young get tangled in it,
Restani said. He and his colleagues are trying to raise awareness about the
danger the twine poses to the birds in hopes that people will pick it up when
they find it and help keep it out of the nests.
Even if the osprey,
which are monogamous, rebuild a nest on the Bell’s property this year, they
won’t reproduce again until next spring, he said.
Jene said the pair of
osprey on she and Dick’s property usually show up in mid-April and stay until
mid-September.
Osprey winter far south of Montana, sometimes venturing
as far as the Caribbean or the or South America, a trip that can take three
weeks, Restani said.
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