Ospreys Maria and Mati

Maria

The GPS telemetric monitoring of ospreys takes place with the support from Eesti Põlevkivi Ltd. and State Forest Management Centre (RMK). The female bird that is called Maria was caught from the nesting site with eaglets closest to the Narva grand pitch. In order to capture Maria, we borrowed a stuffed eagle/owl from the Nigula Nature Reserve. We placed the stuffed eagle/owl in the bog on 23 July 2006 and next to this we put a net. It took perhaps a few hours until Maria found its victim and started attacking it. Before that, however, we had tried to catch a bird in other nesting sites without success for up to two weeks…
Maria, as is mostly common in osprey families, started her fall migration first. By this time the eaglets are already quite good flyers and go fishing with the male bird. The task of the female bird is to lay eggs, hatch, protect the nest and watch the eaglets while the male bird usually brings food – that also explains the difference in size. Maria left the nesting site on 5 August 2006, ate some big fish in the Narva catchment area and by the evening of the next day, left Lake Peipus behind. In six days, Maria made it to the Polesye area in the southern part of Belarus and stayed there for eleven days – it is a safe forest massif and the neighbouring fishing farm gave a good opportunity to gather energy resources. Then the trip continued without longer stops until the jungles of Congo, over the Mediterranean Sea and Sahara. The longest day trips reached up to 550 kilometres. As of 14 September Maria stayed by the Congo River for the winter. So far we had not had any data about Northern European ospreys wintering in this area, and the research of Finnish colleagues had identified the main wintering sites in Western Africa, less in Southern Africa and Israel.

Mati

Mati is a son of an osprey couple living in one bog in Põlvamaa and he got the backpack with the valuable contents on 13 August 2006 and when we went to peek near the nest site on 1 September, Mati was flying completely freely – even so well that we did not manage to take a picture of him. On 7 September Mati’s receiver-transmitter started giving a signal only from one place and on 10 September we went to look there and found that a goshawk or some other bird of prey had attacked Mati and eaten him almost entirely. All this took place 200 m from the nest. Thus, we lost an opportunity to follow the migration of a young osprey to Africa and from the nesting sites there back here. This once again proves that only about half of the ospreys that fly away from their nests live up to the age of maturity…