Final Osprey Report 2026
Sept. 18
Today I’m feeling a little melancholy. The thing about wonder and wild is that wild often means saying goodbye. It may be for a season or it may be forever.
On Tuesday, Sept. 15, I dropped off the September mail club dispatch at the post office. This month I chose to focus on migration because winged life was on the move all around me. Then I went for a walk, and it was the last time I saw osprey in the Forty Acre Wood.
I have been following these birds daily since the parents returned to the valley in April (first post was on April 15 at @41acres on Facebook). Three chicks hatched, and I believe two survived. The last was consistently reluctant to leave the nest, calling out to its dispersing family to join it there in the evenings until finally no one answered back.
Last night the nest was empty at dusk for the first time this summer. I’ve been expecting it for weeks, but it still caused an ache in my heart. For the first time ever I walked up right beneath the nest. Having observed it so often from a distance, I felt awe and wonder to stand beneath it and look up. It’s gigantic. The ground beneath was littered with surprisingly uniform sticks that either blew off or were cast off during the nesting season. Otherwise, the ground was surprisingly tidy. No fish bones or dinner bits anywhere.
And now they’re gone and the nest will stand empty until the spring. Osprey—even the young—migrate alone thousands of miles to central America, where even paired osprey live solitary lives. The young will remain down there for two winters and then return to this general area to breed. It’s not unheard of for osprey to visit their former nest so it’s possible I could see them again, but I wouldn’t recognize them. The parents should be back next April.
I wish the family safe passage on their solo journeys south and a safe eventual return. The Forty Acre Woods will be a little quieter now without their calls to each other echoing through the woods.
If you’d like to read more about the osprey and bird migration from the Forty-One Acres, a limited number of September dispatches are now for sale as a standalone in the shop here.
Photos below: This photo on the left is the last photo I took of the osprey this year. This is the last fledgling to leave the nest. Next, I’m looking straight up at the nest from below, checking out the sticks beneath the nest, standing at the base for scale, and the moon popping out right above it. This final photo is older, but I love it. It wasn’t quite clean enough to use for the mail club and I’m glad to get to share it here.
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