To school's ospreys: Nest has flown, but please return

A crane lifts a 7-year-old nesting site out of the path of construction at a primary school and to a new platform.

By AMY WIMMER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 29, 2002

ST. PETERSBURG -- Two workers gingerly lowered an osprey nest Saturday morning from the 50-foot pole it has occupied for seven years.

Ann Crimmins stood nearby like a nervous mother, almost afraid to watch the goings-on through the lens of her digital camera.

"Now I'm nervous," she said, "because that nest is heavy."

Crimmins, a teacher at Shore Acres Elementary, has documented nearly every stage of this nest with her camera. The project began in 1995, when children in her fourth- and fifth-grade classes built an osprey platform as an Earth Day project.

A pair of ospreys, birds that mate for life, discovered the platform two years later and built a nest there. They have returned every year since, hatching baby birds high atop the Shore Acres Elementary playground.

Now Crimmins, her students and the ospreys are starting over. The platform was in the way of the new school planned at Shore Acres, so Saturday morning she assembled a team of volunteers to relocate the bird nest elsewhere on school property.

Once the osprey home, nestled in the platform Crimmins' students made for it, was on the ground, the teacher got her first look at what the ospreys had used over the years to build their nests. Besides sticks and plant stalks, she found an orange reflector and fish bones.

Crimmins and one of her students, 9-year-old Brandon Corwin, also did some housecleaning while the nest was at ground level. Because much of the material used for nests over the years has turned to mulch, they cleaned out debris and attached a fresh piece of wood to the platform, just to make it look accommodating to a nest-hunting osprey.

Crimmins' students did the same thing before the platform was installed seven years ago. Saturday Crimmins found the original piece of wood, still wired to the osprey platform.

"It's like a time capsule," she said. "We've been wanting to know for years what's in it."

Later Saturday, the workers rigged the platform to the top of another pole, safe from the area where a new school will be constructed. Ospreys look for nesting sites free of shade and often build nests atop telephone poles.

Crimmins teaches at-risk children at Shore Acres and has used the ospreys each year as a learning tool. Many of her classes have used the osprey nest as a project to earn grants, including one that funded the building of a second platform that has not yet been erected.

She hopes the ospreys can find their home's new location. Each year the osprey couple chases off other birds, so the site has become popular.

"I'm hoping they will come back and use it," Crimmins said. "And if they don't, one of the young will."

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