Hi everyone I'm Lily I'm a field ranger
with the US Forest Service here in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic
Area and welcome to osprey watch part two. So
while we're here at the Multnomah Falls visitor center I wanted to give you guys
an up close and personal view of an osprey
that we have here at the falls. So if you look at this bird when we're looking
through the spotting scope the osprey looked quite small but
compared to me, they're pretty big birds and the other
thing I want to point your attention to are the feet. So here you can get a
really close-up view of those large sharp talons and then on
the underside of the toes you can see those kind of like scaly
or almost cone-shaped bits and that is actually to help them
hold on to those slippery fish, and then the other part is up here at
the head, you can see that there is a hooked beak.
So that hooked beak helps them to tear apart their fish
and feed it to the babies. And this osprey is an adult
so we can see that because it has the yellow iris
as well as the kind of matte brown back. So as the babies mature
they'll get their juvenile feathers and these feathers have little white tips on
the edge and they also have brown or reddish iris. As they age
those iris will actually transition to the adult yellow.
So let's go check in on our babies!
So we are back checking in on our osprey family
we're here about one week from the previous time from part one
and you can see that these babies and we can actually see them this time
there's two of them. They seem to be about ten days to 2 weeks old
maybe a couple days more but still definitely needing a lot of
care from their parents.
So here what we see is one of the osprey, I believe it's the male, brought back
a fish and is eating it himself before bringing it up to
the mother and the babies. So going out and finding fish for not only himself
two babies and also the mom takes a lot of
effort so often when he brings fish to the nest they're half eaten or
partially eaten
So here comes a crow
stealing a little chunk of it's fish
So you can see throughout this entire interaction that left
foot has not moved once on top of that fish
So raptor talons it actually takes muscles to open
the talons rather than close them so a resting position for an osprey would be
talons closed around a fish
So every once in a while she'll take a piece for herself
the larger ones are the ones with a lot more bones
So this is the nest next door to the one that we're looking at earlier
you can see the two chicks and the nest here but they're
quite a bit older they actually have some coloration and a lot less
downy fluff
They're moving around a lot and even picking things up with their beaks
I would say that these are maybe five to seven days older than the ones we're
looking at earlier
So here we can actually see one of the young chicks
with the parent
Probably a little over 10 days old still needs a lot of help from the
mother to maintain body heat and also to tear and rip apart the food
There is also oh he just pooped there is also another one in the nest
his head is kind of hunched over
So it looks like she came back with a chunk of moss
so maybe she'll do a little rearranging of the soft bedding for
the young chicks
There she goes moving a stick. Gotta get it in just the right place
So you'll notice how carefully she moves around the nest
if you remember those really sharp talons that are helpful
in catching fish obviously are very sharp so when she's walking around the
nest she's very careful where she's stepping
and also kind of curling those feet inward so that if she does step on
something she doesn't damage the baby
So at this young age these baby osprey are still
mostly fluff, that fluff helps to insulate their bodies and keep them warm
when things get cold. They might also have little pin feathers growing which
are these little feathers that are full of blood that allow the
adult feathers to grow in. Here she comes back in with more moss.
So you can see every once in a while when the baby moves
those wings kind of drop down and that's because at this point they're growing in
what's called blood feathers so it's basically a tube filled with
blood where the feather grows and those are incredibly heavy so not
only are osprey's wings really long compared to the rest of
their body but at this age they're super heavy
so as they walk they kind of flail their arms back and forth and they're not very
agile. Soon that will change once those
feathers start growing in that blood will go away and they'll become
much more graceful