By Herman Veenendaal
For several weeks, myself and two other birdwatchers from St. Marys, Pamela Mulholland and Peter Osborne, had been concerned about the young osprey on its nest at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
Normally, the young would have left the nest by now, but the chick remained and, while still being fed by its parents, was obviously in some distress. It appeared in need of rescue.
A similar rescue took place in 2015 when one of the young had become tangled in binder twine. It could fly to a height of about two meters before reaching the end of the twine trapping it. Brian Salt of Salthaven Wildlife Rescue attended and released the bird from its trap and the bird immediately flew free.
On Aug. 4, I made a post asking for help on the St. Marys Life Facebook page, which resulted in many expressions of concern and suggestions of who to contact for a truck big enough to reach 70 feet, the height of the nest. Kevin Adams of Tri-County Brick in Stratford was one of those who responded and kindly volunteered the use of his boom truck. I then contacted Salt of Salthaven Wildlife Rescue to arrange the rescue operation.
On Aug. 6, Salthaven Wildlife Rescue along with Joe Hanna of Tri-county Brick in Stratford attended the osprey nest at the hall of fame to rescue the trapped osprey chick, which had been unable to leave the nest. It had become trapped in plastic binder twine which the parent birds brought to the nest earlier in the nesting season. A brief break in the rain allowed the operation to go ahead at 9 a.m.
Sadly, the young bird will not survive. One of its legs had been severed by the twine and, while this had healed over, a one-legged osprey cannot hunt. It's also nearly impossible to feed them as a captive bird so the difficult decision was made to humanely euthanize the bird.
This was not the ending any of us had hoped for, but my heartfelt thanks go out to all who responded to the original post, especially to Adams for volunteering the use of his boom truck, Hanna for operating the boom and to the heroic Salt of Salthaven Wildlife Rescue for reaching the nest to rescue the bird.
If there's a lesson to be learned from this, it's to never discard plastic baler twine or any other form of plastic that could trap a bird, ending its life.
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