Current Nature: Year Two Of The Nantucket Osprey Watch Was a Success

How are Nantucket’s ospreys doing? We hear this question often, and after two seasons of watching nests across the island, we are starting to have a much better answer.

Created in 2025 to build a better picture of Nantucket’s breeding ospreys, the Nantucket Osprey Watch expanded significantly this year. We found more nests, welcomed more volunteers, and collected far more observations than last year. By the end of the season, we had documented 59 nest sites, including 9 new ones, and 44 were active. Of those 44 nests, they successfully fledged 58 young ospreys!

One of the most exciting parts of reaching year two is that we can finally start comparing one season to the next. In 2025, our first year of monitoring, we documented 50 nest sites; 40 were active, and they fledged 40 chicks. With this information, we can see how things change from year to year and start building a clearer picture of what truly normal productivity looks like for our Nantucket ospreys.

The monitoring may be especially important right now. Ospreys in some other parts of the East Coast did not have as strong a breeding season, with possible food shortages among the concerns being investigated. Nantucket had an overall productive year, but in early July, volunteers reported a few weak nestlings and some chick losses.

Weather, predation, food availability, and competition within the nest can all affect chick survival. We saw increased competition between siblings in a few nests this summer, which is linked to food availability. We cannot say that was the only factor in all the losses, but it does point to early signs of possible food stress that we want to watch closely in future seasons.

There were plenty of good surprises this year too! We documented our first Nantucket nest with four chicks. Several nests that only began building or “house kept” last year were occupied in 2026, giving us hope that the population will continue to grow year after year.

The project itself continues to grow as well. 17 new volunteers joined us this year, bringing the Nantucket Osprey Watch to 61 volunteers. Together they submitted more than 1,311 nest checks and spent over 314 hours watching our ospreys. That level of coverage lets us tell the story of each nest across the island, and we couldn't do it without our passionate volunteers.

Those are only some of the highlights from the 2026 season. More details about the nests, productivity, observations, volunteer effort, and what we learned this year are in the full Nantucket Osprey Watch Annual Report, which is available for everyone.

Would you like to help watch our ospreys next year? Even with 61 volunteers, we still need more eyes on nests. Since we live in a vacation community, everyone is here on different schedules, and a lot can change between nest visits, and we don’t want to miss anything.

No birding experience is needed, and you do not need to figure it out on your own! We are here to help; we offer training, answer questions, and show you what to look for along the way. Volunteers can follow a nest with just one 15-minute check each week, or simply send in a nest check whenever they can.

Give it a try next season! Sign-up for the 2027 Nantucket Osprey Watch at https://llnf.org/nantucket-osprey-watch. We will start volunteer training in March, so you’ll be prepared and ready to welcome our ospreys back to Nantucket.

Stay tuned for more editions of Current Nature, a biweekly column featuring seasonal topics, natural history information, and advice on the outdoors from the staff at the Linda Loring Nature Foundation.