Mystery of Disappearing Ospreys Might Have Controversial Explanation

The Washington Post / Gregory S. Schneider

12:44 JST, September 24, 2024

When Casey Shaw and Bryan Watts motored their Boston Whaler into Craney Island Creek this summer looking for osprey nests, they hoped to find a pair of birds on every channel marker. Instead they found none.

“It was heartbreaking,” said Shaw, who works for the conservation group Elizabeth River Project in Hampton Roads.

The mystery of vanishing ospreys – a bird of prey that feeds on fish and is not considered endangered – has puzzled homeowners, boaters and conservationists around the Chesapeake Bay the past few years. A new study claims to explain the decline, but the findings have aggravated a much bigger controversy.

Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at William & Mary, wrote earlier this month that osprey chicks are starving to death in areas of the bay where their primary food source is a small, nutrient-rich fish called menhaden.

Environmentalists have seized on the report to support their fight against the menhaden-harvesting industry in Virginia, which is pitted in a long-running battle to hold off regulatory limits. Sport fishermen are allied with the environmentalists, arguing that industrial harvesting has depleted the menhaden supply and harmed other species of birds and fish that feed on it, such as striped bass.

“With the osprey findings – that’s a big wake-up call,” said Steve Atkinson of the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Association. “It clearly shows there’s an ecosystem impact.”

The company at the center of the battle is Omega Protein, which operates out of Reedville on Virginia’s Northern Neck. It’s a waterman town, named after a menhaden fisherman named Captain Elijah Reed who came down from New England in the 1870s. Boats run in and out of Reedville bringing menhaden to a processing plant that grinds the fish into meal and oil – partly to feed farm-raised fish in Canada.

The overall operation employs about 260 people and has a payroll of about $29 million, according to the company.

Other states on the Atlantic Seaboard – including Maryland, New York and New Jersey – have outlawed the kind of massive menhaden harvesting practiced in Virginia by Omega and its affiliate, Ocean Fleet Services.

But the company argues that it obeys limits set by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission on harvesting menhaden from the bay and up and down the Atlantic Coast. “We’re seeing a lot of menhaden in the bay,” said Ben Landry, a spokesman for Ocean Fleet. The company hauls its limit of 51,000 metric tons of menhaden every year from the Chesapeake Bay, he said, and this year’s harvest is so plentiful that the company will probably reach the cap sooner than usual.

Landry argued that ospreys are declining in many parts of the country for what scientists have said are a variety of factors, including climate change, runoff from development and competition from other species. Watts blaming the starvation problem on a lack of menhaden, Landry said, is not supported by science.

“To make the conclusion menhaden are depleted, you have to at least know what baseline you’re working with. What is the abundance of menhaden in the bay? And that’s something Dr. Watts has not had the ability to do,” Landry said.

Advocates have been trying for years to get the state government to address that very issue of menhaden population count, but the politics of the matter are extremely complicated. It’s more regional than partisan, with Hampton Roads lawmakers tending to favor sportfishing interests and rural lawmakers siding with the industry, a major employer in a needy part of the state.

The workforce at Omega is unionized and racially diverse, and the company itself gives generously to politicians on both sides of the aisle – $25,000 to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s inaugural committee, for example, as well as $20,000 to the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus over the past four years, and five-figure amounts to leadership of both parties.

Last year, the General Assembly passed a bill requiring the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to work with stakeholders to outline a plan for what a study of the menhaden issue might look like. It did so, and recommended commissioning a $3 million study. But Youngkin did not include the money in his state budget.

So Del. Lee Ware (R-Powhatan) sponsored a bill in this year’s legislative session to mandate the study. It failed to get out of committee.

“I really am frustrated,” Ware said last week in an interview with The Washington Post. Understanding whether menhaden are being overfished “is very important for the ongoing health of the bay. It seems to me that’s a critically important thing for us to resolve,” he said.

On Sept. 17, Ware announced that he will refile the bill for next year’s session.

Youngkin’s office did not comment on why the governor did not fund the study in this year’s budget, but a spokeswoman said he will “carefully review all legislation that is sent to him during the 2025 General Assembly.”

The spokeswoman, Macaulay Porter, pointed out that the Virginia Marine Resources Commission – whose members are appointed by the governor – adopted a memorandum of understanding with the menhaden industry last year that calls for voluntary buffer zones to limit areas where menhaden can be fished.

“As a conservationist, the Governor has made the Chesapeake Bay one of his top priorities,” Porter said in a written statement. Youngkin proclaimed last week as “Commercial Waterman Safety Week” on the heels of signing a bill earlier this year that toughens penalties for people who endanger commercial fishing boats. That bill, which passed the General Assembly nearly unanimously, was a response to several incidents in which activists reportedly attempted to interfere with fishing operations.

Watts, the conservation scientist, said he fully expected industry supporters to challenge his findings. But he said the report was aimed at addressing the usual complaint that the declining osprey problem is anecdotal and not substantiated for the broader bay region.

He and colleagues had been studying the osprey population in one area of Virginia – Mobjack Bay – since about 2021, when questions about vanishing nests began piling up from people who live or travel on the waters. This year, Watts expanded his study area to a much wider section of the lower bay in Virginia. He and others – such as Shaw – monitored 571 nesting pairs in 12 study areas.

Ten of those areas were high-salinity waters, where the primary food source would be menhaden, he said. Two were areas farther inland with low salinity, where the ospreys have a more varied diet. In the menhaden-dependent areas, ospreys hatched fewer chicks, and far fewer of those survived. Overall, birds in those areas reproduced at less than half the rate necessary to maintain the population, the study found.

In the two inland areas, the osprey pairs reproduced at greater than the rate needed to sustain the population.

“So we have definitely shown that yearly reproductive rates are below maintenance levels in large portions of the bay and, yes, it is because the young are starving in the nest,” he said. “There does not appear to be enough fish to support the brood levels.”

Watts has been studying ospreys since the 1970s. The Chesapeake Bay supports the world’s largest breeding population of the birds, which migrate to South America for the winter. In the 1970s and ’80s, widespread use of the pesticide DDT decimated the bay’s osprey population down to about 1,400 pairs, Watts said.

Outlawing that chemical allowed a remarkable rebound. In recent years, Watts said, the population has been roughly 12,000 pairs.

The current decline is not sharp enough to suggest that the entire species is once again at risk, Watts said.

“I don’t think that is the message that’s coming out of the data,” he said, adding that the “clear message” is actually not about the ospreys. It’s about menhaden.

“The better way to read the information is not related to the viability of the osprey population as a whole but as an indicator that things are not where they need to be in terms of fish availability for the ecosystem,” Watts said. “The fishery [industry] is saying there are plenty of menhaden; the osprey are saying something different.”