An osprey hatched in a south suburban forest preserve has been found more than 2,500 miles from home in South America.
The osprey was found injured in Colombia and nurtured back to health, according to the Forest Preserves of Cook County.
“When I was told that it was Colombia, I was thinking Columbia, Missouri first,” said Chris Anchor, a Forest Preserve senior wildlife biologist. “And when they told me it was actually Colombia, the country, I was rather incredulous.”
The bird was originally banded by Cook County biologists at Sag Quarries in Lemont, where there are 20 nesting platforms for raptors.
Cook County biologists annually measure, weigh, draw blood and check for overall signs of health in recently hatched osprey chicks. Each nesting pair can produce one to four chicks a year.
The conservation effort started in the 1980s after major declines in the osprey, bald eagle and peregrine falcon populations caused, in part, by DDT insecticide use from the 1950s to early 1970s.
Ospreys fly south the winter after they hatch, usually to the Gulf Coast, where they remain for two years as they become sexually mature and find a mate before returning to where they hatched.
Local
The wayward osprey was banded in Lemont in June 2023 and was found dehydrated and disoriented nearly a year later in Bucaramanga, Colombia. The local group that treated the osprey contacted the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bird Banding Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which informed the Cook County biologists who banded the bird.
It’s up there with the farthest an Illinois banded bird has traveled since a rough-legged hawk made it to Quebec in 1986 and some waterfowl made their way to Argentina, Anchor said.
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What are the chances of the bird being found alive and tracked after a more than 2,500-mile trip? “Incredibly remote,” according to Anchor, but he was happy to see it.
“Not only do you get the information of where the bird went, but you get the confirmation the bird is all right,” Anchor said. “That’s the best-case scenario.”
He said we may never know exactly why the osprey got so far off course, but he and his colleagues theorize that it may have been caught up in a storm in the area and brought to where it was found.
The osprey isn’t alone in getting lost. Anchor said some North American birds that migrate to South America have inexplicably shown up in England. It’s a pattern scientists have noticed globally, as climate change shifts weather patterns and affects the instinctual movements of migratory animals, especially birds.
It’s a problem for animals like osprey, which have narrow diets and won’t adapt as quickly as other animals, thus struggling when pushed into new environments.
Anchor said he hopes the bird returns to Illinois so they can take more blood and tissue samples.
“It gives us an ability to keep a thumb on a pulse of the landscape around us,” Anchor said. “Think of all the things [these birds] are exposed to around the world. The vast majority of emerging infectious diseases in humans come from animals, so it helps us to figure out how diseases move across the landscape.”
