A Great Wildlife Success Story Crashes Down
On the Atlantic Coast, ospreys are suddenly in grave trouble
Jul 25, 2026
by Richard Conniff
In happier times, a Connecticut River osprey returns to the nest with a menhaden in tow. (Photo: Krisofer Rowe)
One sunrise earlier this month, I was watching ospreys hunting at the mouth of the Connecticut River. None of them caught their breakfast. The closest they came was when one dropped down to the water, hesitated delicately, its feet just dimpling the surface, then rose again with empty talons. It occurred to me that they might be fledglings, just out of the nest and not yet skilled in the art of feeding themselves.
“Delicate,” however, is not a word you would ever apply to the clumsy antics of osprey fledglings just learning to hunt. Instead, I soon learned, the birds I watched were more likely half-starved adults, and the parents of starving chicks back at the nest.
This came as a shock to me, partly because the Connecticut River Estuary, where I live, is the historic center of the East Coast osprey recovery from a catastrophic decline in the 1950s and 60s. Back then, DDT and dieldrin pollution reduced the local osprey population from 200 nests in the 1930s to a single surviving nest in the early 1970s. Then, just in time, the 1972 Clean Water Act and a nationwide ban on most uses of DDT went into effect. Locally at the same time, birders in the Connecticut River Estuary (notably including the bird artist Roger Tory Peterson) launched the practice of building osprey nesting platforms, which provided greater protection from predators, and it soon spread nationwide.
The recovery of ospreys and other DDT-impaired species, began soon after. I remember the first time we heard the characteristic cheee-cheee-cheee of an osprey over our yard near the Connecticut River, in the mid-1980s.Everybody ran out of the house to gawk. Then we celebrated. It was our first sweet taste of the reality that conservation works.
Over the years since then, we never stopped celebrating ospreys, even later when their daring hunting behavior became commonplace. If you live anywhere near water, you have almost certainly seen and admired the hunt as one of the great shows of summer. Ospreys search for prey from a surprising height, as much as a 100 feet above the water. They may linger over a promising spot, and sometimes swoop lower to hover for a closer look. Then they see a likely fish and plunge toward the water at 40 miles an hour, talons first, wings swept behind, murder in their eyes.
There’s nothing cautious about it. They crash through the surface, sometimes becoming completely submerged. They bob back up after a moment, shake off the water, and pause briefly as if to consider how to proceed. Then their long, narrow wings beat down forcefully enough not just to lift them back into the air, but also the stricken fish clutched in their talons. And they do it over and over each day. At Great Island, a local osprey hot spot, the air from May through July in past years was typically busy as a military air base in wartime, with fish being ferried to hungry nestlings and parents promptly winging out again for more.
Over the years, I suppose we came to assume the species was now permanently safe. But this summer, on emails circulating among osprey specialists, East Coast ospreys seem suddenly to be on the brink of population collapse. Word of nesting failure is coming in everywhere from Virginia to Massachusetts:
In eastern Virginia’s Rappahannock River, observers report that the main osprey nesting site has been “vacated en masse and had an eerie quiet about it … What we are seeing is widespread nest failure … that in some study areas is exceeding 90% of the nests that reach the hatchling stage.”
In the Chesapeake Bay, osprey observers report “alarming reproductive failure and nest abandonment.”
“Everything else that you are seeing,” a New Jersey researcher replies, “we are also seeing in New Jersey this year.” That includes the sad spectacle, at a nest in Stone Harbor, of a month-old nestling desperate for food attacking its mother when she arrives at the nest empty-handed. “I know this aggression is common between siblings when food is scarce but I have never seen this between nestlings and adults.”
And from the Connecticut River Estuary: “This year for the first time in memory, young/active nest[ing] is way way down … about half of replacement rate or less.”
Much less, it turns out a week later, when another count comes in. The break-even point for ospreys is around one juvenile reared to independence per nest per year. In recent decades, reproductive success here has ranged from 1.2 to 1.7 young successfully fledged per nest, meaning the population has steadily expanded. But this year, the nests on average have yielded just .19 fledged osprey, a fraction of what the population needs to sustain itself—lower, in fact, than at the low point of the DDT era.
What’s the cause of this shocking collapse? Osprey specialists say it’s the same threat they have been warning about for years. During nesting season along the East Coast, breeding ospreys are almost entirely dependent on menhaden, an oily nutrient-packed fish that travels in dense schools. The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and the key nursery for much of the East Coast menhaden population.
It’s also the center of operations for a Canadian-owned company called Omega Protein, which harvests menhaden and reduces it to fish meal for livestock and aquaculture, among other products. The company deploys spotter planes to locate schools of menhaden and to provide directions so company boats can encircle them with purse seine nets. It operates not just in the Chesapeake, but south to the Carolinas and north to New York and New Jersey. The reduction fishery, as it’s known, is banned in those states, but the boats are legal as long as they stay three miles or more offshore.
A seine net operation in Chesapeake Bay gathers up menhaden for Omega Protein (Photo: Richard Conniff)
It’s an industrial-scale operation at all levels. Conservationists and sports fishermen have long argued that the company takes far too large a share of the menhaden population, leaving ospreys, striped bass, and other menhaden-dependent species underfed at best. Independent scientific studies, including one published last month in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, have generally agreed.
This year, with menhaden suddenly absent along much of the East Coast and osprey young starving to death in the nest, those arguments are certain to grow louder. But it’s doubtful anyone in a position of responsibility will listen, particularly not under a Trump Administration that is gleefully sweeping aside protections for even the most endangered species, in favor of boosting corporate profits.
For the menhaden fishery—and the future of ospreys and striped bass—the deciding authority is the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which has routinely ruled in favor of Omega Protein. Last fall, its menhaden stock assessment found that the coast-wide population of this key forage fish was 37 percent lower than previously estimated. In charts and acronyms, it indicated that meeting environmental targets would mean cutting the harvest by more than 50 percent. The commission dithered, its customary response, then approved a cut of just 20 percent, and only for 2026. That reversed a 20 percent increase approved in 2023.
The likely outcome is that osprey populations will rapidly shrink over the next few years—and the great summer pleasure of watching them catch fish and rear their young may once again become a distant memory.
Osprey Tales 