When I saw an osprey couple trying to build a nest earlier this spring on a channel marker in the waters off of Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, the building site seemed way too small. Amazingly the ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) found a way to add an overhanging extension that seems to defy gravity. The couple seemed comfortable in the nest, which appear to be capable of easily holding their weight.
A neighboring osprey couple had the opposite problem—they had too much space. The ospreys used only half of the space for their nest and could easily have shared the other half with another couple, but I think that ospreys like to keep their neighbors at arm’s length, or maybe it would be better to say “at wing’s length.”
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Such exsquiste architects. Great photos, love the red offsetting the first nest. Thank you, Mike for the stories and journeys you share with each set of photo, sublime.🕊
Thanks, Suzette, for your ongoing encouragement and support.
Always a pleasure. Thank you! as well
I can picture the conversation, Mike. “Honey, I have a great idea. We can build this out and rent that space out”
“I have an idea, why font you go catch us a fish.”
🙂
Great fish catchers and superb engineers are the fishhawks!
Terrific photographs and post, Mike!
Thanks, Wally. I love watching ospreys fishing and marvel at the way they can hover before they dive down, often sinking below the surface of the water as the snag a fish with their outstretched talons.
Had to think of the word I wanted and now I’ve got it … cantilevered! I wonder if that’s how they did it. This is SO amazing, the first couple have wonderful determination and adaptation! I’m amazed by the other couple too, just how high do they think their nest needs to be? Does the top bar and top of sign literally “set the bar” for the height I wonder? I’m incredulous!
I am unsure how the ospreys figured out how to make it work, but they sure did a great job in building the extension on the very small channel marker. As for the other nest, I think the top of the bars is as high as it is going. If it were too low, it might be more of a problem for extending their wings to take off and/or retracting them to land.
Oh yes, that’s a thought!
That extension does seem to defy gravity!
I am quite amazed, but it seems to be quite sturdy and obviously supports their weight.
Hopefully it will last a very long time and be a home to many broods.
A cantilevered nest, who’d have thought? 😉
I certainly did not imagine that they would do something like that when I saw the couple attempting to build the nest earlier this spring.
[…] past,I have photographed much larger nests on this same buoy—check out my blog posting entitle Defying gravity from last year to see a photo of a previous iteration of a nest at this […]