Osprey Hunt

In my last blog post I said we were going to try and find an osprey this weekend, so today that's what we set out to do. I bought some new second-hand binoculars and we scoured the internet for rumours of recent sightings. We decided to make our way to 'Passie's Pond', where one had been sighted a few days before. It's some way along the Adur, the river that meets the sea at Shoreham, near Brighton. 

The river was high when we started and there were quite a few other birds about: lots of swallows sweeping over, some little egrets on an island and we saw a kingfisher zoom past us like an arrow with a bright red behind, but no ospreys on the river. We were hoping Passie's Pond would be the place.

Passie's Pond was a dilapidated fisherman's encampment. All along this fenced off part of the river there were little jetties where solitary fishermen sat with their equipment and snacks. We weren't allowed to look round the actual pond though. A bitter little bald man made it clear we weren't welcome because we weren't paying to fish, so we ate our lunch out of his sight and gazed hopefully into the sky for a glimpse of a far superior, flying, fish hunter. What strange inefficient fishers we must look like to the osprey, with our complicated contraptions, waiting for the fish to come to us. The osprey glides hundreds of metres up in the sky looking for the best fish and picks it out with speed and accuracy and authority.

We were downhearted as we made our slow way home. The landscape along the river is bleak, punctuated with crumbling windowless buildings and industrial huts. Motorways roar around you and every now and then an intimidating gun shot punches out. The grey cloud cover above added to the desolation. I've never liked this place, I thought. We said consoling things to each other, like 'at least we tried' and 'it's nice to get out of the house', 'we saw a kingfisher, that was pretty good', and it was pretty good to see a kingfisher but the day had been a failure and we were resigned to it.

Then, as we walked back down the river, Rose saw something that looked fairly big hovering over a field. I thought it was probably just another crow or seagull, but it wasn't, it was an osprey, definitely an osprey and we became more convinced as we watched it through binoculars. It flew closer and swooped down to land in the field, and was immediately set upon by some crows. It had obviously trespassed into their land and was hounded out, just like we had been hounded out of the grumpy fishermen's special pond club. The osprey flew off into some trees across the river. While it was still in sight, I scrambled to take some photos. The photo above has an osprey in it. It's difficult to see, but it's in there. It's one of the black marks in the sky. If you use your imagination you can see the majestic fisherbird being hounded by crows.

And so the day quickly flipped from a resigned failure to a well-planned success. We had seen an osprey. 

When I was young I used to copy pictures of birds of prey out of books and I decided my favourite bird was the osprey. I'm not entirely sure why, it just looked cool. Now I've seen one, in the wild. It's a very satisfying feeling.

Here's someone else's better photo of an osprey: