GLOUCESTER POINT, Va. — Stepping onto an old wooden duck blind in the middle of the York River, Bryan Watts looks down at a circle of sticks and pine cones on the weathered, guano-spattered platform. It’s a failed osprey nest, taken over by diving terns.
“The birds never laid here this year,” said Watts, near the mouth of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. “And that’s a pattern we’ve been seeing these last couple of years.”
Watts has a more intimate relationship with ospreys than most people have with a bird — he has climbed to their nests to free them from plastic bags, fed them by hand and monitored their eggs with telescopic mirrors.
The fish-eating raptor known for gymnastic dives and whistle-like chirps is an American conservation success story. After pesticides and other hazards nearly eliminated the species from much of the country, the hawk-like bird rebounded after the banning of DDT in 1972 and now numbers in the thousands in the U.S.
But Watts has documented an alarming trend. The birds, which breed in many parts of the U.S., are failing to successfully fledge enough chicks around their key population center of the Chesapeake Bay. The longtime biologist blames the decline of menhaden, a small schooling fish critical to the osprey diet. Without menhaden to eat, chicks are starving and dying in nests, Watts said.
Watts’s claim has put him and environmental groups at odds with the fishing industry, trade unions and sometimes government regulators. Menhaden is valuable for fish oil, fish meal and agricultural food as well as bait.
U.S. fishermen have caught at least 1.1 billion pounds of menhaden every year since 1951. Members of the industry tout its sustainability and said the decline in osprey may have nothing to do with fishing.
But without help, the osprey population could tumble to levels not seen since the dark days of DDT, said Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
“The osprey are yelling pretty loudly that, hey, there’s not enough menhaden for us to reproduce successfully,” Watts said. “And we should be listening to them to be more informed fully on the fisheries side, and we should take precaution on the fisheries management side. But that hasn’t won the day at this point.”
Watts, who has studied osprey on the Chesapeake for decades, has backed his claims of population decline by publishing studies in scientific journals. He said it boils down to a simple statistic — to maintain population, osprey pairs need to average 1.15 chicks per year.
Osprey were reproducing at that level in the 1980s, but today i