Dear Margot, Regarding your first question; ospreys are creatures of habit and if you watch them closely and take notes, you will be able to determine when a new bird has moved in. Example : I watched a nest on Chappy for many seasons and still do. The male would always come back with a fish and half eat it on a sign post, then drop it off to the female in the nest. After several seasons, the male no longer followed the same steps, but rather went directly to the nest with the fish. No question here about a change in ospreys at a given nest. Your second question, do they mate for life ? Ospreys fidelity is to the nest, not to one another. Once they pair up on a particular nest site whether it be natural or man made that becomes theirs as long as they survive their annual migration to S.A. When the youngsters fledge, shortly after the female leaves for her winter grounds, somewhere in S.A. and the male could stay on until late September/ early October before heading to his winter grounds. You might say that they take separate vacations. Spring comes around and the male generally shows up first and begins his task of trimming out the nest and shortly after the female shows up and the process starts all over again with courtship. Tagging; to the best of my recollection, there have been no ospreys tagged at your nest. As far as tagging one there, I defer to Rob Bierregaard to answer that question. He just reached a milestone in his research by tagging his 103 osprey in Newfoundland, which inccidently is the number of your pole. It certainly is worth dropping him an email and asking the question. I will tell you the transmitters that we have put on these birds are not cheap and i will leave that up to him to discuss with you and that would if he would entertain doing one more. He's a great individual and do not hesitate one bit to contact him. rbierreg.@gmail.com I didn't intend on writing a novel and I hope that I have been helpful. Dick Jennings

Typically a pair will return every year to the same nest until one doesn't make it back from migration. When that happens, the surviving member of the pair is likely to accept a replacement mate, so a nest could be occupied for years by what seems to be one pair. The Makonikey pair has not been tagged, and we're no longer tagging new birds. We catch them by placing a trap over the nest. The birds get their toes caught in small snares tied out of fishing line. One can distinguish young from adults by the speckling on the back and wings of the youngsters. All the body feathers on the young have a white edging to them, which makes them look spotted.