The Osprey Rescue

8-6-05

While we were sitting on the patio this evening we heard a boat come very close to the shore just north of our dock. At the same time our friend John came near the dock on his pontoon boat and hollered that there was an Osprey caught in a tree. Becky ran out on the dock while I was getting some shoes on and she hollered for me to come quick. Here's what she saw.

Here's another picture she took with a 3x telephoto. This tree looks like it's about 35 to 40 feet high.

After looking the situation over and thinking about how to get the bird down with the least damage, I decided to try to get a rope over the branch and see if we could break it off and free the bird. The branch that it's stuck on looked like it was dead so I thought we could probably break it off. I took an old water ski rope, tied a fairly good sized wrench on the end, attached a heavier rope to the other end, and then proceeded to try to throw it over the branch. It took about 5 tries but I finally got it over the branch. Here's an action shot of the wrench on its way up with the light rope trailing behind.

After successfully getting the rope over the branch and pulling on it the branch broke and the Osprey broke free. It flew away to the north but looked like it was really struggling to stay in the air and you could see that its leg was severely injured. We watched it long enough to see that it landed in a neighbor's yard After the onlookers left we managed to sneak up on the exhausted bird and I was able to get my fish landing net over it without doing any more damage.

I carefully picked it up being very wary of those sharp talons.

You can see in the picture above that its leg is injured and swollen. At this point the only way I could think of to get it out of the net was to cut the net loose from the frame and take the bird to the Garrison Animal Hospital. In the meantime Becky had called Dr Deb and she said that she'd meet us at the clinic. We put me and the bird in the back seat and Becky chauffeured us to Garrison. Here we have just entered the clinic and are about to transfer the Osprey to a holding cage. The big smile will give you a pretty good idea of how I felt about being able to help this Osprey.

Between Dr Deb and myself we managed to get the Osprey out of the netting without either of us getting hurt or doing any more damage to the bird and finally got it into the cage.

Finally, here's a close up picture of a very lucky Osprey. As we were getting the netting off, the bird moved the talons on its injured leg. Dr Deb said that was a very good sign and meant that the nerves hadn't been damaged. She will be taking x-rays of the leg tomorrow to determine the extent of its injuries but it's looking pretty hopeful right now that the bird will recover and be able to be released after it heals.

Thanks to Becky for taking all of these pictures except one.

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