Eagle-Eyed Woman Is the Hero in Dramatic Save of Injured Osprey

It was breakfast time, said Judith Sherman, around 10 a.m. on August 10, when she came downstairs from her Water Mill home, where she’s lived since 1974, to see a “very large bird flying into a tree.”

Sherman had recently been observing a bald eagle in the area through her binoculars and thought it might be the male showing off again. Then she saw the bird — which turned out to be an osprey — turn upside down and flap his wings with his breast exposed.

“I thought at first it was something to call a female,” said Sherman.

But something seemed wrong.

Sherman looked through her binoculars again. It looked like the bird was struggling, and she saw that it appeared to be in distress.

It was: The osprey was hanging from a branch on a dead tree located on a property far across Mecox Bay, its leg wrapped in rope and fishing line.

Sherman tried calling the Southampton Fire Department, and then called the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays, which reached out to volunteer Missy Hargraves.

“She had trouble getting in touch with anyone,” recalled Hargraves, who called 911 and got in touch with the fire department. “I said, this may not be important to you, but it’s important to me, and it’s important to Mrs. Sherman.”

It was important to Assistant Chief Dillon Berkoski of the Bridgehampton Fire Department as well, who sprang into action and arrived at Sherman’s home to investigate. Sherman recalled the interaction, her voice heavy with awe and emotion as she said Berkoski “picked up the binoculars, he looked, he turned around and he said, ‘Mrs. Sherman, I’m on it.’”

After getting the call and initiating a 911 response, Hargraves headed to Rose Hill Road from her home in North Haven, and by the time she got there, two fire trucks from two fire agencies — Bridgehampton and Southampton — and a total of 15 people were on site, including neighbors, kids and others. The homeowners weren’t home, but “we went on the property” to try to save the bird, said Hargraves.

That turned out to be something of a challenge.

The bird had gotten entangled on a dead branch high up in a tree and out of reach. Fire trucks couldn’t access the property to deploy their cherry pickers, and, Hargraves said, the tree wasn’t stable enough to put a ladder up against it — and anyway, the ladder would only reach about halfway to the bird, which Hargraves estimated was between 50 and 80 feet in the air.

Oh, and it was raining. Hard.

Rescuers at first tried to use a rope with a weight at the end of it to break the tree branch, but that didn’t work — “they couldn’t get the rope up there,” said Hargraves. “So all of us were standing around, the little kids, too, in the rain, trying to figure out what to do, and somebody had the idea to get a fishing rod to cast up over the branch.”

First, they needed a fishing pole, which are plentiful in these parts. “They found one, cast the line over, and we were able to pull on the fishing line and break the branch,” said Hargraves. “The branch came tumbling down — and the bird got knocked out for a second when it hit the ground. We were all worried, but then it came to very quickly and was very active.”

That’s where Hargraves’s “major job” came into play as a longtime rescue transport volunteer with the center: subdue the bird, get it into a carrier, and then to the hospital at the center.

But first, a firefighter whom Hargraves described as having experience as a falconer, cut the rope and fishing line that had been attached to the osprey’s leg, and freed it from the branch.

The rope had been there awhile — so long, in fact, that the bird’s flesh had started to grow around it, said Hargraves.

The osprey is now on a round of anti-inflammatory medication to address soft tissue damage on its leg, and it’s uncertain whether the animal will be able to use it again moving forward, said Noelle Dunlop, director of development at the rescue center.

The rope, she confirmed, “had been on there for a very, very long time,” and the irony is that “this bird was saved by the very materials — fishing line and rope — that caused his distress in the first place.”

The prognosis for the bird is guarded. “We are trying to get to the bottom of whether this bird is going to regain use of the leg.”

The osprey needs to be able to grasp prey with both talons to survive in the wild, she noted. An X-ray was scheduled for this week.

“The bird is generally in good condition, meaning that it wasn’t emaciated,” she said. “Even though it had this impediment hanging from its leg, it was still able to hunt.”

Dunlop said the public-service takeaway is something she is always urging — bring a trash bag to the beach and keep an eye out for nests of fishing line, or any trash for that matter. “It washes up and the birds can get tangled in it.”

Another takeaway lesson for the public, said Hargraves — beyond taking a moment to appreciate a community effort to save the distressed animal on a rainy Thursday afternoon — is that “if you see an animal in distress, we will come. Make the call.”

“We named the bird ‘Sherman,’ by the way,” Hargraves said with a laugh.

“She happened to be at the right place at the right time looking across the bay with a very good pair of binoculars,” Dunlop said of the eagle-eyed elder who initiated the community rescue, “and spotted this bird, which would have been hanging there for a very long time if she hadn’t. It was a lucky moment for the bird.”

In recalling the events of the day, Sherman stated, “I could not bear to watch that bird struggling anymore,” as she heralded the efforts undertaken by “15 unusual, marvelous people, our people who live out here, who figured out how to bring the bird down alive.”