Examining the Territory of Ospreys in the Wye River (page 2)

Materials

• A boat and driver
• A car and driver
• A GPS
• Computer with Excel
• Computer with Arc View
• Pen and paper
• Binoculars

Procedure

To collect my data for the project, I went out on a boat on the Wye River and searched for Osprey nests. When I found one, I recorded how the nest looked, if there were and young, the nest’s longitude and latitude and took pictures if possible. I then made a table on Excel and Arc View and made each nest appear as a point on the map. Next, I measured the distance from each nest to the next closest in miles and found the average distance.

Discussion

The data tells us that the average distance for osprey nesting territory on the Wye River is 0.579167 miles. To get this as my final answer, I found the average of the distance to the closest nest, which I found by using the measuring tool on Arc View. Then, I typed the distances into Excel and found the average.

When I went out on the boat I made a guess for the height of the nest above the water. I also recorded if there were any young to see if height made a difference to whether the nest was currently used or abandoned. Out of 11 nests whose approximate height was 25 ft, 9 nests had young, although none looked totally abandon. Out of 4 nests whose approximate height was 10 ft, only 1 had young and 2 looked totally abandon. There were only 2, 15 ft nests and both had young. There were also only 2, 5ft nests. Only one had young but the other looked like no osprey had been there in years. Height did not seem to have and effect on where the Osprey would nest.

I also observed what kind of structure the Osprey nested on. 10 nests were on man-made Osprey poles. 7 had young and 2 looked abandon. There were also 4 nests on telephone poles. 2 nests had young and 2 didn’t. None of these nests looked abandon. I also saw 2 nests in trees and both had young. The last types of nests I saw were nests on top of a boom, pilings and a duck blind. The nests on the boom and duck blind had young but the nest on the pilings looked abandon. Although the favorite was an osprey pole, the type of structure did not seem to make a difference to the osprey.

Conclusion

What is the average nesting size of Osprey?? I found that on parts of the Wye River and Wye Island, the average nesting size is about .6 miles. I determined this by getting a GPS coordinate for every Osprey nest I could find on Wye Island and part of the Wye River. I then plotted the coordinates on Arc View and found the distance to the nearest nest. I put all of the measurements into Excel and found the average.

By getting the mean of the distances between the 19 recorded nests I can tell the average is .6 miles. There is some variation in my data. The distance to the closest nests ranged from .07 to 1.43. The other measurements I took were the longitude and latitude for the osprey nests.

The measure of central tendency that I chose (mean) was correct because it is the very close to the median and there is no mode. In this study, the GPS could have gave incorrect coordinates for a point or I could have missed a point when scanning with my binoculars. To further this study, I would check get a boat with a Fish Finder on it and go out once every week to the same nests to see if the amount of fish for food had any impact on where the nests were. This problem is important because we could be wasting money if we put osprey poles up to close together. Also, the osprey are bioindicators for the river and bay, if they’re not there, the fish population could be in decline as well.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Mr. Wolf who took me out in his boat to look for Osprey.

Bibliography

www.mbr-pwrc.us.gov/cgi-bin/pkstpgmo.pl?/sola/jrs/bbs03/ntmird/03640.md 10/12/04

www.osprey.org.ulc/awoop/about%201teratue.htm 10/12/04

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/classification/path/Pandion_haliaetus.html.html#Pandion%20haliaetus 10/12/04

Chesapeake Bay Field Office, ”Osprey… Pandion helianthus [Online]Available http://www.fws.gov/r5cbfo/osprey.htm#top

Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, “OSPREYS: THE NAME AND LITERARY REFERENCES” [Online] Available http://www.ospreys.org.uk/AWOP/About%20literature.htm 10/12/04

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