A woman in Estonia watching a webcam trained on an osprey nest in Montana was able to alert researchers that an endangered baby osprey was in trouble.
My husband, who likes to read nature magazines, knew this story was a good one for Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog the minute he saw it this afternoon.
Doug Stewart writes at National Wildlife, “The nest overlooks the parking lot of a nursing home in Hellgate Canyon near Missoula. All summer, hundreds of thousands of people watched online as three nestlings screamed deliriously at fish deliveries or listened to their parents vent their fury at encroaching bald eagles.
“At one point last summer, one of the three chicks became entangled in monofilament line from a fish brought back to the nest. Fishing line can quickly strangle an osprey chick. It was a Sunday, and the researchers had not been online to check the nest.
“ ‘We were first alerted to the fishing line by an email from a woman in Estonia,’ says [biologist Erick] Greene. ‘Then we heard from a woman in Wales.’ The researchers also had set up a Facebook page for the ospreys, and in no time it became filled with alerts from concerned visitors. Borrowing a truck equipped with a bucket that can raise up to the level of the nest, the biologists raced to the scene to cut away the line from the chick and removed a fish hook embedded in its wing. The bird survived.”
More great details at National Wildlife, including a description of 700 kids at an urban school watching the webcam and tweeting questions about the osprey to researchers, here.
Watch the osprey here.
Photo: National Wildlife
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