The Ospreys of the Willamette

There is a bird working the Willamette all summer that catches fish for a living and does it by falling out of the sky feet-first. Most people in Portland have seen one without knowing what they were looking at — a big pale raptor over the water, hanging in one spot, then folding up and hitting the surface hard enough to disappear.

The osprey. Every photograph below was made along the Willamette, most of them within sight of the Sellwood Bridge, and most of them after a long wait.

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Not a Hawk, Not an Eagle

Start with the taxonomy, because it explains everything else. The osprey is not a hawk and not an eagle. It sits alone in its own family, Pandionidae — one species, Pandion haliaetus, with no close relatives anywhere. Every other diurnal raptor in Oregon has cousins. This one does not.

It earned the isolation by specializing further than anything else with talons. An osprey’s diet is about ninety-nine percent live fish. Not mostly fish. Not fish when available. Fish, essentially exclusively, everywhere on earth it lives — and it lives nearly everywhere, on every continent except Antarctica, as the same species doing the same job over water.

The old name for it was fish hawk, and the other old name was sea hawk, which is where the Seattle football team got theirs. The word “osprey” itself comes down through Latin from ossifraga — bone-breaker — which was almost certainly first applied to a different bird and stuck to this one by accident. Common names are like that.

The Hover

Before anything happens, an osprey stops. It will hold a fixed position thirty to a hundred feet above the water, wings beating, feet dangling, head locked downward — genuinely hovering, which very few birds anywhere near this size can do. Kestrels do it. Kingfishers do it. Eagles and red-tailed hawks do not.

That hover is the bird buying time. It is judging depth, angle, distance and the movement of the fish through a moving surface, and it will hold there and abort and hold again and abort again. This is where the hour goes.

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That is very nearly a field guide plate. Open any guide to the raptor pages and the flight illustrations are undersides, drawn that way because it is the only view a person on the ground ever gets. So read it properly: follow each wing out to the bend and you will find a dark patch at the wrist. Those two dark commas — the carpal patches — plus a white belly and a five-to-six-foot wingspan will name this bird at a distance where nothing else about it is visible.

And notice how white the underside is. An osprey is dark chocolate above and nearly white below, and the accepted explanation is that it works in both directions: from above, against dark water, the bird vanishes — and from below, by a fish, against a bright sky, a pale belly is far less of a shape than a dark one. It is camouflaged against the sky on the side that faces its dinner. What you are looking at here is roughly what the fish sees, a second or two before it matters.

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I waited about an hour on the bank for that. It is always a contest over who has more patience, and the honest answer is that the bird does. This is true of every fishing bird — herons and egrets are even worse, and a great blue will stand in cold water without visibly moving for longer than most people will stand anywhere. Usually they win. Usually I am the one who gives up and walks back to the car.

Which is also why I mostly go alone. Bring somebody along and there is a schedule in the conversation — something to get back to, somewhere to be at three. The moment a schedule exists, the hour of standing still becomes impossible, and the hour of standing still is the entire method.

The Strike

When it commits, it goes in feet-first from height, closing its nostrils on the way down, and it will often go right under — three feet or so below the surface, briefly out of sight. No other raptor does this as a matter of routine.

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I am fairly sure that one was a miss.

Which makes it the more honest photograph. We publish the successes and quietly leave out how much of an osprey’s day consists of hitting the water and coming up with nothing. Success rates vary a great deal between studies, seasons and rivers, but plenty of them land well under half. This is a bird whose entire profession involves failing repeatedly, in public, in front of an audience of ducks.

Coming Up Short

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The climb-out is the hardest athletic moment in the sequence and the part nobody thinks about. A hawk that misses is still in the air. An osprey that misses is in the water, soaked, with nothing to push off. It has to haul itself out with two or three enormous downstrokes, and it is one of very few raptors that can take off from the surface at all. Dense, oily plumage is what keeps the attempt from becoming a swim.

Then it does something almost nothing else can do: it shakes itself off in mid-air, a full-body shudder while flying, like a wet dog that happens to be airborne. And then it goes back up and hovers again. No sulking, no deciding it is not a fishing sort of day.

Nobody photographs the misses. Nobody counts the mornings that produced nothing. But the bird that eats is not the bird that never missed — it is the bird that went back up.

The Feet

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This is the frame that shows you why the whole strategy works. An osprey’s outer toe reverses on demand, swinging backward so the foot closes two toes forward and two back — a pincer instead of a clamp. The pads underneath are studded with spicules: short barbed spines whose only job is holding something wet, muscular and violently uncooperative. Nothing else with talons is built quite this way, and that is a large part of why the osprey sits in its own family.

Two more things in this photograph. The dark stripe through the eye is not decoration — it is anti-glare, the same principle as the black an outfielder smears under his eyes. A bird that stares down into bright water for a living needs the reflected light knocked back.

And look at the speckling across the chest. A clean white breast usually means a male; a band of brown mottling like a necklace usually means a female. It is one of the few raptor field marks in North America that will tell you the sex of a bird from a photograph, and once you know it you will start checking every osprey you see.

The Carry

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Held crosswise, a fish is a drag brake — a slab of dead weight fighting the air the whole way home. So the osprey turns it in flight, sometimes while still climbing out of the strike, until it lies head-forward and belly-down like a torpedo slung under a fuselage. A bird hauling a fish that can weigh a third of what it does needs every bit of that.

They do drop them. A fish gets lost in a scuffle, or shaken loose on a bad landing, or simply released by a startled bird — and it falls out of the sky onto whatever is underneath. Roofs, roads, back yards, the occasional windshield. Enough fish arrive this way that it accounts for a fair share of the “it rained fish” stories people tell.

I call it the osprey air service, and I have wondered whether it is how fish end up in ponds they could not possibly have swum to. The honest answer is probably not — a fish that falls a hundred feet onto dry ground is not going to found a colony. But the instinct behind the question turns out to be sound, because birds really do move fish around. Researchers have shown that fish eggs can survive passage through a duck’s gut and hatch afterward. The delivery service is real. It just runs a different route than it looks like from the ground.

A View You Do Not Usually Get

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Now go back and look at the hovering bird again, because this is the other half of it. That one is the underside every field guide draws. This one is the top — the dark chocolate mantle, the rows of upperwing coverts laid over each other like tiles, the white crown and the eye stripe from above. Same animal, both sides, which is not a pairing you can usually assemble.

You do not get this view from the ground at all. You get it from being higher than the bird, which normally means a glider, a drone, or a very tall building.

I took it from the Sellwood Bridge, leaning out over the guard rail with roughly eight thousand dollars of camera and lens hanging over open water. Which brings me to the only rule I have about this: no photograph is worth risking your life. Your camera, maybe. I leaned enough to get the angle and not one inch further. A camera can be replaced. You cannot.

Identifying One From the Bridge

You do not need to see the face. From a long way off, an osprey in flight holds its wings in a shallow M — wrists pushed forward and up, hands drooping down and back. Nothing else over the Willamette flies with that kink. A bald eagle holds its wings dead flat like a plank. A red-tailed hawk soars in a slight V.

Add the contrast — dark above, startlingly white below — and you have it at half a mile. If it is hovering, it is settled: nothing else that size stops in mid-air over water here.

Where They Go in Winter

Look for them from about April to September and then stop looking, because they leave. Oregon’s ospreys migrate to Mexico and Central and South America and come back to the same nest — often literally the same platform — the following spring.

The young do something stranger. A juvenile osprey flies south in its first autumn and then simply stays there — through the following spring and summer, more than a year on the wintering grounds, while the adults commute past it in both directions. It comes north only when it is old enough to breed. The first migration of its life is a one-way trip that takes eighteen months to complete.

The nests are worth watching for on your way over any bridge. Ospreys build enormous stick platforms on top of anything tall and open — channel markers, cell towers, light standards, construction cranes — and they return to the same one for years, adding to it every season until it weighs a startling amount. They took to artificial platforms so readily that putting poles up became one of the standard tools for bringing the species back after DDT, the same poison that nearly finished the bald eagles. Two birds, one chemical, one ban, two recoveries. You can see both of them from the Sellwood Bridge now.

The Fish Tax

There is one more thing that happens out here, and it is the reason I laugh every time somebody calls the bald eagle a symbol of self-reliance.

I have watched bald eagles take fish out of an osprey’s feet in mid-air. The osprey does the hovering, the diving, the soaking and the hauling. The eagle waits on a branch, watches, and then simply comes and collects. I call it the fish tax, and I have told that to a good many people at Oaks Bottom and generally gotten a laugh — except for the fellow who turned out to work for the IRS.

I found out afterward that I was about two hundred and fifty years late to the observation. Benjamin Franklin wrote almost exactly the same complaint in a letter, objecting to the bald eagle as a national emblem on the grounds that it is a bird of bad moral character that lets the fishing hawk do the work and then robs him. I had no idea. It is a strange feeling to arrive at a joke on your own and then discover a founding father got there first.

The photograph of the robbery in progress is in the eagle post: Bald Eagles of Portland and Neskowin →

Go and Look

Between about April and September, walk out to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge and look downriver. Give it fifteen minutes. If something big and pale stops dead in the air over the water, you have found one, and everything above is about to happen in front of you.

It will probably miss. Watch what it does next.

Quiz: Eleven Questions on Ospreys