Osprey fledgling killed when nest topples near Kars
Wildlife lovers along the Rideau River near Kars are heartbroken after a long-standing osprey nest near the W.A. Taylor Conservation Area was toppled Tuesday night and at least one nearly full-grown fledgling killed.
Landowner Dave Craig — who had erected the nesting platform after buying the property in 1985 — was cutting grass below the nest when he accidentally clipped it with his tractor.
“Nobody is more upset about it more than I am,” Craig said Thursday. “I caught the post with the front wheel. It’s been up there a long time and it had rotted off right at ground level.”
The ospreys had two fledglings, one of which Craig watched fly away. The other was discovered by Emily Scholfield and her mother, Dinah, who noticed from Dinah’s house on the opposite shore that the nest had fallen and came to investigate. Originally, they had hoped the fledglings had survived and could be rescued and taken to the Wild Bird Care Centre for rehabilitation.
They grabbed two boxes and a pair of oven mitts for protection, then followed a trail leading to the site, which — though they didn’t realize it at the time — is on private land adjacent to the conservation area. They found the body of one fledgling buried under the planks from the fallen platform and feared that the nest had been pulled down deliberately, particularly after seeing the tractor tire tracks.
“He was almost full-grown,” Emily Scholfield said. “He weighed six pounds. We stretched out his wings and the feathers were long. He couldn’t have been far from flying,” she said.
She wrote a Facebook post about the ospreys that has been widely shared, speculating that the nest had been destroyed on purpose.
“Last night I witnessed something that has left me feeling sick and disturbed down to my soul ...” she wrote.
Pairs of ospreys have nested atop the pole for at least a decade, she said. “Everyone along the river just loves to watch these birds. They just swoop down and — plop — come up with a five-pound bass.”
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry is investigating the incident, confirmed spokeswoman Jolanta Kowalksi, though she would not reveal any more details. Dinah Scholfield turned over the bird corpse to an MNRF investigator on Thursday.
Dinah published her own Facebook post about the incident.
“This morning, there are no cries from the parents as they have left, perhaps never to return, no cries from the chicks asking for food and now, just empty skies that once offered the most thrilling sights in nature,” she wrote.
Once threatened, osprey populations in Eastern Ontario have exploded in the past decades since the pesticide DDT was banned, said birding columnist Bruce Di Labio. Artificial nesting platforms have also helped the birds to reproduce, he said. Some platforms were erected by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry and conservation groups and others by Ontario Hydro as a way to keep ospreys from nesting on utility poles.
Craig said the platform on his property was one of several put up when he was president of the Osgoode conservation club. He says he reported the accident to the OMNRF and the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority on Wednesday morning.
“I knew they’d be getting some calls,” he said.
Meanwhile, he’s already planning a replacement and picked up an old TV tower in Brockville on Thursday that he hopes to erect in the next week or so.