The Ospreys Are Coming

Watch out! We are about to be besieged by the wily fish hawk … oops, I mean osprey.

I grew up in Mattituck, and we had one fish hawk pair that everyone knew about, and only one. No one dared molest it. We fished and hunted but we always respected the fish hawk. We didn’t know that it was one of the very few bird species that was found on every continent, save Antarctica.

Each year in March, the pair returned to its nest in a tall oak tree in Brower Woods at the edge of Mattituck Creek. Nest in a tree? Yes, although the average schoolboy or girl wouldn’t say so today. The last osprey nests in trees on the South Fork were in North Sea at the edge of Scallop Pond and on the west side of Accabonac Harbor less than a quarter of a mile up Springs-Fireplace Road.

Bob and Marie, who have been the proprietors of the fish farm called Multi Aquaculture Systems on the north side of Promised Land Road (or Cranberry Hole Road), next to Napeague State Park, have had a pair of ospreys nesting atop a utility pole for more than 30 years.

Bob is very good to them, but he wishes they wouldn’t try to steal the fish he is raising in tanks. He once freed one that was caught in some wires he put over the open tanks to discourage them — only to have the freed osprey dive right back into the tank after a fish.

Bob says that in the last three years the ospreys (same pair, or offspring from them) have behaved themselves.

There was a time in the 1960s when osprey practically disappeared from Long Island. Suffolk County Vector Control was partly to blame, because they were controlling mosquitoes with DDT and other toxins. A group of naturalists got together and sued, DDT was banned, the vector controllers changed their ways, and the ospreys started making a comeback.

In the 1950s, the ospreys were at the top of their game. I remember going to the south spit of Gardiners Island with Paul Stoutenburgh to check out two massive osprey nests, 3 to 4 feet high, on the beach, along with gull and tern nests. At the same time, there were a few nests on glacial erratic boulders just offshore. The last osprey nest on a boulder in the water was in the early 2000s in Accabonac Harbor.

The same Paul Stoutenburgh took me to Nassau Point on the North Fork to the site of a duck blind that we sat in during several Novembers in the 1950s. Not duck hunters this time around but osprey comebackers, we put up one of the first Long Island osprey nests on a pole, not wooded but a length of aluminum irrigation pipe, the only straight and strong structure we could get our hands on. It worked — but, thank God, there were no lightning storms in that area during the nesting season!

Ospreys have always nested on roadside utility poles on the North Fork, especially in East Marion and Orient on the North Fork. In the very late 1970s and 1980s, the Long Island Lighting Company began putting up utility poles with osprey nesting platforms on them in East Hampton and Southampton. Russell Hoeflich, who ran the South Fork chapter of The Nature Conservancy, advised them. Kevin McDonald of what was then the Group for the South Fork, who was handy with tools, invented a perch that could easily be attached to the nesting platform.

By that time, a team of local conservationists from various organizations and town agencies were putting up osprey poles with nests and repairing others that had fallen into disrepair.

We put them up throughout the marshes on the South Fork in Southampton and East Hampton towns at likely nesting and fishing spots, such as Georgica Pond, Accabonac Harbor, Northwest Creek, Three Mile Harbor, North Sea Harbor, Morton National Wildlife Refuge in Noyac, on North Haven and in Sag Harbor.

We put one on the little island in the northeast corner of Fort Pond, Montauk. It worked for a few years, but as the little island — substantial enough in the 1920s to support huge trees such as American basswood — sank further and further away, the nest disintegrated and the osprey pair abandoned it. The island has completely disappeared since 2020.

Today, there are three osprey nests on utility pole platforms on Long Beach and Short Beach roads put up by the Long Island Power Authority and PSEG Long Island. They have been occupied successfully for at least three years now by osprey pairs. There is a fourth successful nest atop a utility pole on the west side of State Route 114 just north of the bridge connecting the Village of North Haven with Sag Harbor.

Chris Chapin, who is both an amateur naturalist and a Realtor, drove by this nest on February 17 when there were two ospreys in it, marking one of the earliest returns in the new millennium.

There is one more nest in that area: It’s an old-style nest atop a pole erected by human volunteers in one of the marshes lining Sag Harbor Cove. It’s been tilting south of Short Beach Road, just east of the John Steinbeck house, for quite a while.

A pair of ospreys has used this pole nest to raise their young for a few years now. One wonders if they chose this spot over the much more secure utility pole nests put up by LIPA along the nearby road out of appreciation and respect for the late author?