New born chicks from last year’s nest waiting for a meal.

The hatching of osprey eggs happens like clockwork: Once an egg is laid, it will hatch in 34-40 days. That makes today a big day at the RVAOspreyCam. Today is Day 34 for our first egg, which Maggie delivered on March 16. Hatchwatch 2018 has begun, and these next few days are going to be very exciting!

For those scoring at home, Egg No. 2 was laid on March 18 and Egg No. 3 was laid on March 21st. Last year, our pair, Maggie and Walker, laid three eggs but only two were viable. Let’s see how things go this year.

Check out (and listen to) all the action at RVAOspreyCam.com.

You have to wonder if Maggie and Walker are cursing their early return from South America today. To update: RVA’s favorite osprey pair are taking turns sitting on two eggs (with possibly one more to come) through the snow and wind. The good news is that they are evolutionarily adapted to handle this. Man, it sure looks cold, though! Follow the action at RVAOspreyCam.com.

Here are some pics:

Maggie on the nest this morning.

For a few moments, the eggs were left unattended when Maggie left to go hunt (presumably).

Then Walker flew in to take over the incubation duties.

If it feels like spring is somewhere around the corner, well, Richmond’s most famous raptor pair agrees with you. Remember Maggie and Walker, the osprey couple showcased for the first time last year at RVAOspreyCam.com? How could you forget, right? Well, they’re back from their sojourn in South America, ready to mate, nest and raise young on that same bridge piling in downtown Richmond again.

One of the peregrine falcons in a nest box on the James River Bridge in Newport News. Credit: Wildstreaming.com

And the osprey cam is back, as well, with some sweet upgrades. This year we’ve added audio, so you can hear the birds’ vocalizations, and infrared for nighttime viewing. It’s going to be a lot of fun again, and it’s all thanks to the Friends of the James River Park, whose support continues to make this effort a reality

But, wait, there’s more!

Bryan Watts at the Center for Conservation Biology invited us to put up a peregrine falcon cam on the James River Bridge linking Newport News to Isle of Wight County. Last year there were less than 30 nesting pairs of peregrine falcons in Virginia. You can follow both cams — the falcons and the ospreys side by side at WildStreaming.com

Editor’s note: The Virginia Master Naturalist program is a statewide corps of volunteers providing education, outreach, and service dedicated to the management of natural resources and natural areas within their communities. The Pocahontas Chapter works on projects primarily in Chesterfield County. It is accepting a limited number of applications for the 2018 Basic Training Class from now until October 31 or whenever the class is filled.

As a newly minted Pocahontas Chapter Virginia Master Naturalist in 2014, one of the first volunteer tasks I helped with at Pocahontas State Park in Chesterfield County was monitoring bluebird boxes. I found it to be both enjoyable and rewarding.

The author with a blue bird nest box at Chesterfield’s Horner park.

Several months after the 2014 summer season, the Downing Ruritan Club of Midlothian was trying to decide what to do with several un-used bluebird houses it had left over from a joint project with the Boy Scouts. The extra boxes had been sitting for several years in the safe confines of a club member’s garage, and he was ready either to find a good use for them or simply discard them. I am a member of that club, but I was unaware of the unused boxes until the member mentioned his desire to dispose of them.

About the same time, Lee and Jane Hesler, who coordinate the bluebird box monitoring at Pocahontas State Park and are the Virginia Bluebird Society county coordinators, were encouraging Master Naturalists to identify and develop additional bluebird house trails elsewhere in Chesterfield County. Horner Park is a still undeveloped county park, located just off Genito Road adjacent to the Clover Hill Athletic Complex. It is not far from where I live, and it seemed to me it would make a great location for a new trail. Mark Battista, Naturalist with the Chesterfield County Department of Parks and Recreation, agreed to help me determine good locations for the boxes at the park. We soon found several excellent sites for the twelve boxes the Downing Ruritan Club was able to supply.

The actual placing of the boxes was a team effort, with a county staff member operating an auger and the Ruritan Club assisting in the installation. The Heslers improved the boxes by adding wire predator guards around the entry holes and stovepipe snake guards around the support poles. The Virginia Bluebird Society provided the funds to add the predator guards.

The boxes were not fully in place until well into the 2015 summer season, but a few of the boxes
yielded bluebird and Carolina Chickadee nests, eggs, and fledglings before the season drew to a
close.

The summer of 2016 saw a doubling of the number of active nests and of fledglings. This
year, all 12 boxes have hosted at least one active nest of bluebirds or chickadees, and it appears
our number of fledglings will be close to double the numbers from 2016. Not bad for only the
second full season!

Blue bird chicks in a nest box at Bryan Park. Credit: Friends of Bryan Park

This has been a real team effort: a local Ruritan club with unused bluebird boxes; a new Master
Naturalist in search of a project; a county naturalist who could make the trail a reality in a county
park; and the Heslers, who encouraged me and helped make the boxes safe and productive.

There’s one more piece to the puzzle — a local Baptist church near the park entrance lets us keep
our monitoring supplies safely under lock and key in a storage shed on their property. This allows
multiple volunteers to access the materials from a convenient, secure location. The icing on the
cake is that the time I spend personally monitoring the trail counts toward my recertification
volunteer hours as a Virginia Master Naturalist, and also toward my Ruritan Club’s public service
hours. That’s what I call a win all around!

Well, folks, it was a fun ride. The first season of the RVAOspreyCam is now in the books. Our adults returned in March, mated, and laid three eggs (two of which hatched). We had a naming contest for the adults (Maggie and Walker won) and watched as the chicks grew and thrived. Now they’ve grown up and left the nest to fish the James just like their parents. But unlike Maggie and Walker, this year’s chicks won’t come back to our nest. They’ll have to find their own territory and mates when they return from South America after the upcoming winter.

The two newborn chicks on May 1st.

There are still plenty of ospreys in the area, of course — I saw four near the Nickel Bridge just on Monday — but, while they’ll stop by from time to time, they’re no longer using the nest as their base of operations.

Maggie and Walker will be back next year, assuming good health persists in the intervening months, and when they do we’ll be ready for them. This offseason we’ll be adding audio, so we can hear all the birds’ vocalizations, and infrared, to facilitate nighttime viewing. Next year’s cam will be 24 hours of audio-visual avian bliss!

If you were an RVAOspreyCam viewer (we had over a quarter million views in 5 months!), thanks for spending time with us. If this is your first time hearing about the cam, check out the site to learn more and check back in with us late next February when the osprey show returns to downtown RVA.

Just because the action is winding down at the RVA Osprey Cam, doesn’t mean there’s no bird cam action in Richmond right now. In fact, over at the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries peregrine falcon cam, the excitement is building for Fledge Watch 2017.

A screen shot of the DGIF’s peregrine falcon cam atop the Riverfront Plaza downtown.

The DGIF Falcon cam follows the breeding season of a Peregrine Falcon pair that nests in downtown Richmond atop the Riverfront Plaza building. This year there are two chicks, and the 2017 Falcon Fledge Watch has been scheduled for Thursday, July 6th.  The DGIF will remotely open the pen door, by activating the mechanical device previously installed on the pen, sometime between 9:30 and 10 a.m. allowing the young falcons to exit the pen and take their first flight when they are ready. As in past years, DGIF personnel and volunteers will be present at several vantage points in downtown Richmond to monitor the birds and ensure that their first day on the wing goes well and without incident.  A second day of monitoring may take place on Friday, July 7th.

Falcon Cam observers may have noticed that the chicks, now nearly six weeks old, are really beginning to look like young falcons. Their brown and buff juvenile plumage has grown in, almost entirely, with only a few scattered traces of down remaining and they’ve developed the distinctive falcon facial markings. They’ve also been seen occasionally exercising their wings in preparation for their first flights.

Click here to check out Richmond’s only pair of peregrine falcons and watch the big event next week.

It’s a bittersweet time over at the RVA Osprey Cam. If you haven’t checked in on Maggie and Walker recently (those are the adult ospreys), you missed their two chicks both successfully fledging — i.e. taking flight out of the nest. The younger of the two just fledged a couple of days ago — the older a few days before that.

A young osprey tests its wings in the nest days before fledging.

However, that doesn’t mean all the action is over at the nest. Our young ospreys will spend a couple of weeks getting stronger in the air and learning to hunt the James River on their own. As we’ve seen already, they return to the nest periodically, as do Maggie and Walker, to rest and eat fish the parents bring.

It’s been an incredible first season for the RVA Osprey Cam, starting in early March with the return of Maggie and Walker from points south, followed by mating, egg laying, hatch watch, hatching, watching the young in the nest and now fledging. Time draws near for the end of this season. It won’t be more than a few weeks before the young birds are gone for good. Maggie and Walker, of course, we’ll see again next winter when they return from South America for Season 2!

Support the RVA Osprey Cam by buying one of these sweet t-shirts!

If you missed the news, on Sunday at Dominion Riverrock our RVA Osprey Cam partners the Friends of the James River Park announced the names for the adult ospreys. After almost two weeks of online and in-person voting at Riverrock, we counted up the over 1,200 votes. The winning name pair?

Maggie and Walker!

Considering ospreys usually mate for life and return to the same nest every year, we’re hoping to get to know Maggie and Walker for years to come.

The cam wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of our sponsors — the Friends of the JRP, Ellwood Thompson’s, the James River Association and Property Results — and next year we hope to add features like audio and infrared (for viewing at night). So, we’ve launched a Bonfire campaign with some sweet RVA Osprey Cam t-shirts. If you’ve enjoyed the cam — and there is still plenty of action left, as the chicks get ready to fledge — please consider supporting the cam and the Friends of the JRP by buying a t-shirt. Thanks!

Last week we solicited name pairs for our osprey parents at the RVA Osprey Cam (click here to find out why we’re naming the adults, not the chicks). Well, now it’s time to unveil the top five pairs chosen by a panel of distinguished judges from RichmondOutside and the Friends of the James River Park.

But first some context. We received almost 70 submissions from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the cam site chat room and email. The suggestions were all over the map, from the world of entertainment (Porgy and Bess, Olive Oyl and Popeye, Bonnie and Clyde), to sports (Larry and Magic) to Norse mythology (Odin and Freyja).  James and Belle and Ralph and Cricket (i.e. former James River Park Manager Ralph White and his wife Cricket) tied for the most submissions.

It wasn’t easy winnowing those choices down to five, but we burned the midnight oil and got it done. As of this moment, when you go to the RVA Osprey Cam site, you’ll find a voting button. Submit your email address and you can vote once an hour, all day every day through 3:30 p.m on May 21st. That’s the Sunday of Dominion Riverrock, and that’s when we’ll announce the winning name pair at the Friends of the James River Park booth at Riverrock. Shortly thereafter, we’ll put the winning name online.

So, here we are. Drumroll please…

The names are:

James and Belle – submitted by Mike Holbert, Adrienne Fenley and Rachel Cohen

Ralph and Cricket – submitted by Brent Merritt, Lorne Field and Molly Dellinger-Wray

Maggie and Walker – submitted by Carol Shimkus

Oscar and Olive – submitted by Hadley Walder

Annabel and Lee – submitted by Mary Beth Long

Click here to vote!

It was an eventful weekend for viewers of the RVA Osprey Cam. On the high side, we watched the parents dutifully dote on their first two chicks, bringing shad and ripping off pieces to feed the little ones. As a shad fisherman of the hook-and-line variety, it’s amazing to see the success rate of these born hunters in a river that, for many days, was swollen and muddy. These are conditions that wash out most shad trips for humans. Our friends didn’t seem to miss a beat. It reminds me of the stat I read that under the right conditions, osprey dives can be successful close to 80 percent of the time. Incredible.

But on the low side, we discovered on Friday afternoon that the third egg wasn’t viable. The mother pushed it out from under her at one point. It eventually broke, and there was no chick inside. Barbara Slatcher, with the Center for Conservation Biology, tells me this isn’t uncommon.

“Usually the cause is old age or weather or it was uncovered in the cold too long,” she wrote in an email. “My guess in this case is age. I am just guessing, but it looks to me this pair has been together a long time. They are both very experienced, and the male is very attentive and fish is no problem for them (which it was with the eagles downriver). Plus the nest is huge (old)!  Two out of three is pretty normal, but young adults get 100 percent many times. They incubated fine, nothing has been disturbing them. Weather has been very good.”

So, we move on with two adults and two chicks who appear to be healthy and growing. And that brings us to our next big announcement: It’s time to name the parents!

Wait, why the parents, you ask, with all the excitement surrounding the birth of the chicks? Well, it’s simple: In six to eight weeks these babies will fledge. They’ll leave the nest on their first flight. For a month or two they’ll return to the nest frequently, getting stronger in the air and eventually learning to hunt for fish on their own. In other words, there’s plenty of show left, but as the summer winds down the young adults will leave the nest for good. They’ll have to find their own mates and territory.

The parents, on the other hand, are Richmonders. They’ve been returning to this nest site for years. How many I’m not sure, but I’ve watched them for three nesting seasons now. They’ll be the ones returning from their migration (probably to South America) next February/March ready to start mating/nesting/parenting anew. If all goes well, we’ll get to know them over the course of years. How cool is that?

So, here’s what we’ll do: For the next week — through Sunday, May 7 at midnight — we’ll be taking name suggestions. They have to be pairs. Think Ozzie and Harriet, Andrew and Freiden, Levar and Stoney. Anything! Well, not anything, but you get the idea. On Monday, we, along with our awesome partners at the Friends of the James River Park, will cull the list to five or six pairs, and voting will begin at RVAOspreyCam.com. We’ll announce the winning pair at the Friends of the James River Park‘s booth (and online) at Dominion Riverrock on Sunday, May 21 (you’ll also be able to vote at the booth on Friday and Saturday).

So, send us your ideas. You can go to RVAOspreyCam.com and vote on the live chat; email us at andy@richmondoutside; or find us on social media. Message us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Let the naming begin!