They're Home! Osprey Return To Island Beach State Park (2024)

Community Corner

The Osprey Cam is up and running.

Posted Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 6:29 pm ET

Bandit and Bay showed up earlier this week to begin tidying up their Jersey Shore home on top of a nest next to the Pete McClain Osprey Cam, outside the park's Interpretive Center. The Osprey Cam was named after Paul D. McClain, who bought the osprey back to New Jersey back in the last 1960s.

The banded pair will probably straighten up around the house before the nesting season begins. The females usually lay a clutch of two or three eggs. The birds hatch in late May or early June. You can watch the activity from their arrival until the chicks take their first flight here.

We owe the growing population of osprey at the park to the late Paul D. "Pete" McClain, who was deputy director of the Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife when he decided to bring the osprey back to the Jersey Shore and Island Beach.

Environmental conditions were grim for the large raptor birds back in the early 1970s. Nesting sites were hard to come by, due to the rapid development of wetlands. DDT and other chemicals had been heavily used in 1950s and 1960s for mosquito control and worked their way into the food chain.

By 1968 there were only 12 osprey nests at Island Beach State Park. By 1974, the number had dropped to just one. Osprey eggs laid during those years were too thin and brittle for the chicks to survive the incubation period.

McLain founded the Osprey Project along with Teddy Schubert, a conservation officer with the Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife. The two traveled to Maryland, where osprey eggs were healthier because there was less pesticide contamination and more nesting areas.

McLain and Schubert made the often perilous climbs to osprey nests high in the sky - sometimes dropped in by helicopter, sometimes by clambering up utility poles - and removed some of the healthy eggs.

The healthy eggs were put into incubators, then trucked back to New Jersey. They were then gently placed in osprey nests at Island Beach and down the coast, in the hopes the osprey parents would accept the new eggs.
Within 20 minutes, the adult osprey returned to the nests and began incubating the new eggs. The egg transfer program continued from 1975 thorough 1981, when there was no longer any need for it.

Their work was chronicled in the vintage documentary film "The Osprey - A New Jersey Success Story." Click on the video above to watch the film, much of which is narrated by McLain, who died in 2014.

McLain and Schubert also had a group of hardy volunteers who helped build and erect osprey nests. They came up with the "New Jersey design" nest, which featured a square basket at the top that provided protection for the eggs and chicks and provided a perching area for adult birds, according to the film.

"Before we could even stick the pole in the ground, the osprey were trying to nest in it," McLain recalled at a talk at Island Beach several years ago.

Sixty nests were built between 1975 and 1981 and were well accepted by the adult birds.

Ben Wurst - habitat program manager for the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey - is carrying on McLain's legacy.

The cost of maintaining the Osprey Cam at Island Beach is roughly $5,000 a year. Donations are gratefully accepted. To make a donation, click here.

Image: Sandy Crowley Bon