Watching Nature

One of my greatest pleasures is watching wild life. Not that I have that much in my back yard with any frequency, but I do see on occasion deer, hawks and wild turkeys. There is also the normal array of birds, and cats with daily frequency. Then there is the occasional nocturnal visit by fox, and raccoons leaving paw prints on my back door.

For the past several years another way to observe wildlife has been the “cam”. I had watched eagle cam and osprey cam with great delight from the return of the feathered couples, to their nest renovations, egg laying and hatching (sometimes taking care of the chick that didn’t survive), to watching the fledglings grow and launch themselves into life on their own.

But, alas and alack, this year both cams are down.

The eagle cam is really down. The tree that held the nest and the camera fell last summer during a storm. The new camera installed to catch activity at the new nest doesn’t work and cannot be worked on during nesting season because these birds are protected.

The osprey cam (maintained by the Audubon Society of CT) is also new and works once in a while. Here again, it’s hard to go up there to try and fix it because of the birds. Ospreys are not protected, but have you ever seen the talons on those guys?

A couple of years ago one of the osprey chicks was spotted partially wrapped in some sort of plastic and the local fire department sent a man up the pole to rescue the bird. I guess the parents of the chick were flying around having fits, but they did not attack (as far as I know) the Good Samaritan. This pole I’m talking about is in the middle of a marsh along the Connecticut shore. This was not easy.