Hi all, We have decided not to band the chicks at the Hellgate nest and we want to share our reasons with you. You can think of our Montana Osprey Project as a three-legged stool, involving research, education and conservation. We originally set up the camera at this Hellgate nest mainly for educational purposes – to share with you this very intimate window into one Osprey family’s daily life. This camera has been amazingly successful: Iris and Stanley and their chicks are watched by many thousands of people in almost 200 countries around the world. We have become very attached to these wild birds, and their daily, monthly and yearly trials and tribulations have captivated all of us. Through the lives of Iris and Stanley and their chicks, we are also able to share with you larger issues about behavior, ecology and conservation of Ospreys and other wildlife. For example, we have been sharing our research results about toxins in our rivers, lakes and streams, the dangers of baling twine, and migration and dispersal behavior (starring globe-trotting Rapunzel). But in previous years the Hellgate nest has done double-duty – we have used it both for both education (the camera) and research (taking blood and feather samples from the chicks). We now have intensively sampled Osprey chicks for nine years. We have done this along a stretch of more than 150 miles of the Clark Fork River in one of the largest EPA Superfund Sites in the country. The Osprey chicks have helped us understand how toxic heavy metals associated with mining (especially arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc) move through aquatic ecosystems, how they get concentrated in the top aquatic predators (Ospreys), what effect heavy metals have on Osprey reproduction, and how effective the Superfund remediation and restoration has been. We are still conducting our research on heavy metals in Ospreys. But we now have a very complete data set from many nests from nine years. Since we now have such good baseline information, we have now scaled back our sampling to many fewer Osprey nests, strategically placed across our large study area. This summer we have only taken blood from Osprey chicks at six nests. In total we banded 14 chicks, and we are delighted to report that all of them went back into their nests just as feisty as they were when we took them out. Any time we band birds there is a very small risk of injury or even death. We are extremely careful when we band and bleed chicks, but we are always aware that there is a risk. Our number one guiding principle when we band chicks is their safety. But if anything bad should ever happen while we were banding the Hellgate chicks it would devastate all of us. Even though this is extremely unlikely, we do not want to risk it. And since we do not need to sample as many nests now, we are going to dedicate the Hellgate nest solely to education. We will continue to update you on the results of our research, but we will not band the Hellgate chicks. Cheers, Erick Greene
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 22:41:59 +0000
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