The Dive Bombers : Ospreys Not Afraid to Plunge Right In

Who are the best fishermen in California?

Those pros who win big money at the bass tournaments?

The Newport Beach guys who catch all those marlin at Cabo San Lucas?

Or the old men who catch catfish as long as your arm at Lake Casitas and Vail Lake?

It’ none of the above. Not even close. The best fish catchers in California have the longest toenails you ever saw, over-developed jaws, can see an ant at a thousand yards and wear feathers.

We’re talking ospreys here, or at least the ospreys now living near the state’s Crystal Lake hatchery in Shasta County.

It used to be, a couple or three ospreys would show up each summer at the hatchery, where the Department of Fish and Game annually spends $500,000 to $600,000 of fishing license revenue money raising several hundred thousand rainbow, brook, brown and cutthroat trout.

Now, though, Crystal Lake hatchery looks like an osprey flying circus.

“There are times when we have seen 18 ospreys overhead, diving on the raceways (long concrete ponds where trout are raised) for fish,” said Gene Arnold, hatchery manager.

“We’ve counted nine nests in this general area. They’re diving on fish just about all day long. And they’re pretty bold, too--I’ve had ‘em crash into the raceway so close to where I’m standing I’ve gotten wet.”

Arnold watched one of the huge raptors soar about 50 feet over one of the raceways, which are 500 feet long with water 2 feet deep, then suddenly angle down and crash into the water, creating a major splash. Almost instantly, the osprey’s powerful wings carried it above the water, where observers could see two trout, six to eight inches each, clutched in its talons.

In mid-air, about 10 feet over the raceway, the bird shook, almost violently, ridding itself of excess water. As it did so, it dropped one of the trout onto the pavement.

The osprey then turned the remaining fish around with its talons, so that it faced straight ahead, in a more aerodynamic position.

“I’ve never seen one carry two fish off,” Arnold said. “One’s all they can handle. And they never try for the larger trout in the other raceways. They stick to the six and eight-inchers.

“One time on the Klamath River, I saw an osprey grab onto a king salmon that was too big for it. It couldn’t pull its talons out, and the salmon pulled him under and drowned him.”

Fishing at a fish hatchery can also be hazardous to an osprey’s health.

“One time, one of them got its talons stuck in a dividing screen and it drowned,” Arnold said. “Another time, two of them left here, headed south, and they both flew into a power line over there and electrocuted themselves.”

Ospreys are in the family of fish-eating hawks. They’re commonly found in Northern California near large bodies of water. Wing spans can reach six feet. They’re easy to identify, with Lone Ranger-type masks on white heads, long, narrow wings with black-white coloring, and gray-cream underbodies.

They’re slightly smaller than their white-headed cousins, bald eagles, and differ considerably in their fishing technique. Bald eagles snatch fish from the surface of the water. Call them the fly fishing set of fish-catching raptors. Ospreys, on the other hand, are not subtle. They go strictly heavy tackle.

According to “Birds of Prey,” by Mary Louise Grossman and John Hamlet, the Osprey is one of two raptors that crash head-long into water in pursuit of fish, the other being the black-collared hawk of tropical Central and South America.

Ospreys are able to grip their slippery prey with special foot adaptations known as spicules, horny appendages that provide for added gripping strength.

In the decades after World War II, ospreys declined in numbers in much of their habitat, much like bald eagles. DDT and other pesticides found their way into their food chain, resulting in thinner egg shells. But both species now appear to be recovering, according to Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

“In some parts of North America and England, ospreys became extremely rare,” he said. “But now, they seem to be on their way back. They’re commonly seen in Northern California and Baja California.”

Indeed, a prime osprey-watching region is the Pacific midriff area of Baja California, where the 28th parallel crosses the peninsula. The nearby calving lagoons of the California gray whales are osprey hunting waters. So is Magdalena Bay, also on Baja’s Pacific side, about 250 miles farther south.

At Crystal Lake hatchery, though, the Ospreys have become something of a nuisance and the obvious question is: Are their increased numbers an economic threat to California’s 2.1 million licensed fishermen? Are we talking reduced limits here?

“Not really,” Arnold said. “The number of trout the ospreys actually kill is economically insignificant. They’ll kill maybe a few thousand trout in a year and we raise hundreds of thousands.

“The problem is when they drop an 8- to 10-inch trout into a raceway full of fingerling-size trout. By the time we learn the bigger trout is in there, he’s eaten maybe hundreds of his little brothers. We found one one time that’d put on four pounds in four months.

“In one four-month period, we estimate we lost 30,000 fingerlings to two catchable-size trout. We lose about $40,000 worth of trout to raptors each year, including ospreys, gulls and black-crowned and great blue herons.”

Solutions?

“We could build cages over the raceways, but that would cost about $350,000,” Arnold said.

“Ospreys aren’t the only problem. We lose fish to herons, too. A heron will get in the raceway and stay there all afternoon, eating fish, until someone chases him out.”

Arnold said that the ospreys leave in mid-September and return in mid-May, using the same nests. Baum Lake, about half a mile from the hatchery, is also a site of considerable osprey activity, sometimes attracting as many bird photographers as trout fishermen.

Arnold watched two more ospreys crash into one of his raceways, seconds apart. Workmen were nearby, but the big birds didn’t seem to mind. The two birds arose from the raceway, shook off the water, turned their fish around head-first, and flew off, in the direction of Baum Lake.

With them went two more airborne trout, destined for the stomachs of osprey chicks, courtesy of California’s licensed fishermen, instead of some fisherman’s hook.

“They’re beautiful birds to watch,” Arnold said. “They’re such great fliers. But sometimes they make me awful mad.”