THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 12, 1996 TAG: 9607110180
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY MARY REID BARROW, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 178 lines
THE OSPREY'S FIERY orange eyes fixed a menacing glare on Reese Lukei as Lukei held the young bird by its legs and body with one hand and with the other hand, deftly snapped a metal band around one of its legs.
Lukei put the bird back in its big stick nest on the nesting platform at Back Bay and went about banding its two siblings. The banded bird stood at the side of the nest and watched, its stare threatening. On the verge of testing its wings, the 40-to-45-day-old bird was almost a week older than its siblings.
Once banded, the younger birds crouched down close on the bottom of the nest, heads down, bodies still. There was definitely no courage in those two fast beating hearts.
``The mama already told them to sit down there and be quiet,'' Lukei said. ``And they're doing just what mama told them to do.''
Overhead, mama circled and circled, whistling her high-pitched cry and uttering threatening, clicking noises. Although during past banding efforts, Lukei has been strafed by protective mothers, this one would occasionally swoop in close, but only so close.
A volunteer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Lukei was out on Back Bay that morning to count and band the young osprey born at False Cape State Park this spring. During the next couple of weeks, Lukei counted just about all the youngsters on Back Bay, both at False Cape and Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and banded those whose nests were accessible.
He also worked the Lynnhaven River where 10 of the 15 nests are in Seashore State Park alone. In addition, for the first time, he's surveying osprey on the North Landing River, another favorite haunt of the big birds in Virginia Beach.
Osprey were once an endangered species, their numbers decimated by the deadly pesticide DDT. In the early 1970s only 500 pair lived in the whole Chesapeake Bay region. After DDT was banned, the population of the big fish hawks increased to the point they are no longer protected and last year 1,600 nests were mapped around the Bay and that didn't include non-nesting pairs of which there are always some.
``But as long as they are still migrating to South America and eating fish with DDT there,'' Lukei explained, ``we still have to monitor their production.''
Counting birds is a way of monitoring production in a given location from year to year. And banding the birds will build a data base after many years that will provide information on many aspects of the osprey's well being, such as migration route, winter home, age at death and cause of death.
Each metal band has an I.D. number and the words: ``Advise Fish & Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C.'' This year an osprey banded on the Chesapeake Bay in 1974 was found dead in Trinidad and the band was mailed back to Washington.
To get a good handle on production, Lukei likes to inspect the nests in three different stages, once in early spring to count eggs, later to count infant chicks and lastly to band and make a final count. That is ideal, he said, but often the combination of good weather and his travel schedule as National Coordinator of the American Discovery Trail don't align.
The osprey don't always cooperate either.
For example, he had to go back to False Cape a couple of weeks later because that day, he found several youngsters only about 20 days old, too young to band. The bands are sized to fit an adult osprey leg - non-restricting yet small enough not to slip off.
``Also there's no reason to band until there is sufficient reason to believe they are old enough to survive,'' Lukei said.
Great horned owls and raccoons prey on young osprey and violent storms can blow chicks out of their nests, indeed can blow the nest down or even topple the nesting platform altogether. Heat, if it comes too early in the year, the way it did for a time this year, can also spell disaster.
``The mom does as much as she can to cool them,'' Lukei said. ``She even skims the water to get her breast feathers wet to cool them in the nest.
``You also will see her with her wings spread out, too,'' he went on. ``She's actually `mantling' to protect them from the heat.''
That early morning on Back Bay was great for osprey and humans alike - cool, calm and pleasant.
Park Ranger Chuck Butler was skipper of the pontoon boat and Chief Park Ranger Gary Williamson and his wife Phyllis were also aboard. As Butler turned the boat away from the first nest, the male who had been off fishing joined the female and neither was ready to rest easy until the boat was long gone.
``They're following us,'' Lukei said. ``They're going to chase us out of town!''
From there, it was on to the second nest of the morning. At Back Bay the big birds have set up housekeeping on not only man-made nesting platforms erected by volunteers like Lukei, but also on hunters' duck blinds and in some trees along the shoreline of uninhabited islands.
Lukei can usually reach the nests on platforms and duck blinds (and also on channel markers in the Lynnhaven) but he cannot band birds whose nests are high in the treetops. That day he banded seven birds. Seven more were too young. He found one nest failure and one nest that had only one chick although there were three eggs in the nest on his first visit.
The trip was an education in osprey family life - stay-at-home moms and workaholic dads. ``Dad is the provider and mom takes care of the nest,'' Lukei said. ``She takes care of the kids and fends off intruders.''
In fact if the father dies, the female's instinct to stay with the nest is so strong, she won't leave to fish for food. ``Every so often we have to intervene or supplement,'' Lukei said.
For example, when something happened to the male in a nest on Eastern Shore's Fisherman Island recently, commercial watermen were asked to toss fish up to the mother and the chicks every afternoon as the men returned home with their catch, he said.
Osprey, which mate for life, have an average of two to four youngsters a year with 1 2/3 youngsters actually fledging from the nest. Eggs are laid in sequence and hatch in the same sequence as they are laid. As in the first nest, there can be as much as a week's difference in age between siblings.
Like their parents, these youngsters will migrate to South America late this summer but unlike the adults, the young will stay there for 18 months until they are sexually mature. ``They are too young to mate,'' Lukei explained, ``so why put out the energy to migrate?''
When the birds do migrate back to the United States, they most probably will arrive around the first of March in the vicinity of where they were born to start a family of their own. When they come back, the birds' orange eyes will have turned yellow and they will have molted their white-flecked flight feathers and solid black flight feathers will have grown in their place.
As Lukei was banding another youngster, he pointed out the bird's deeply curved, sharply pointed claws. The talons, four on each foot, are lethal weapons used to snatch a slippery, fast moving fish right from the water. Osprey have the ability to rotate one talon which gives them the option of using two talons or one talon and three on each side of the foot. Even the inside of the foot itself is rough to help in holding a wriggling fish.
``It's so rough, it's like a wood rasp,'' Williamson said, after rubbing a finger along a sand papery, pinkish-white foot.
Although there are volunteer bird banders in some other areas of the Bay region, Lukei is the only person in Virginia Beach to band the big fish hawks. ``The problem is a lot of people express an interest,'' he said, ``until they find out how hard it is, what the hours are and what the pay is.''
Of course the pay is zilch for volunteers. Work usually begins at 7 a.m. or earlier when the wind is calm and there is not a lot of boat traffic.
But it's not those two factors alone that turn potential banders off. Interest really wanes when they see Lukei balanced precariously on an extension ladder that is standing on the bottom of a bobbing boat or in shallow water on mucky, unstable mud and is leaning against a not-so-stable nesting platform.
Interest disappears altogether after they see one of the big, old poisonous cottonmouth moccasins that frequent Back Bay swim by. ``More than one time,'' Lukei said, ``I've tried to run on water to get back in the boat!''
Despite the risks, Lukei has not been injured while banding birds ``At least not that I will admit,'' he said with a chuckle.
In fact he's been coming back for more each year since he first banded and counted birds at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in 1989. Since then he's banded close to 200 osprey. This year alone he banded 22 youngsters on Back Bay and 16 on the Lynnhaven.
Not bad for no pay. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos, including color cover, by D. KEVIN
ELLIOTT
A male osprey carring a fish flies around its nest while waiting for
the intruders to leave.
As Park Ranger Chuck Butler keeps an eye out for the parents,
wildlife volunteer Reese Lukei bands a baby osprey on its Back Bay
nesting platform.
Young osprey, on the verge of testing their wings, await the return
of their parents to the nest after being banded.
Park Ranger Chuck Butler, left, and wildlife volunteer Reese Lukei
use a hand-held device to check the postion - via satellite - of an
osprey nest on Back Bay.
A young osprey voices its displeaure with Lukei and glares at him
with menacing orange eyes. Banding the birds builds a data base that
will provide information on many aspects of the osprey's well being.
Graphic
[Box]
Lukei's statistics on the state of osprey in Virginia Beach in 1996:
Back Bay Lynnhaven River
Nests monitored 23 15
Nests occupied 19 13
Number of eggs NA 30
Osprey fledged 26 26
Osprey fledged per nest 1.4 2
Osprey banded 22 16
KEYWORDS: BACK BAY WILDLIFE REFUGE OSPREY ENDANGERED SPECIES by CNB