Julie's Improbable Flight
The Journey of a Young Osprey
On a midsummer day in 2016 a young osprey peered over the thicket of her massive nest and stepped to the edge. She stretched her already considerable wings, fledged with newly-grown feathers, and jumped.
Named Julie by a team of local volunteers, her first flights were short forays over the rushes, grasses, and riverine pools of her home along the Detroit River in southeast Michigan, prompted by her parents' gradual weaning of delivered fish.
Julie hunted the river banks of the wetland system, her eyes perfectly equipped to detect movement beneath the surface.
She mastered circling high above, then plunging feet-first into the water to capture her prey with specialized talons.
When viewed from above, her nursery was a rich variety of wetlands, river deltas, irrigation channels, and the deeper waters of the Detroit River.
To Julie, this was the extent of the world.
For a short while.
As the summer days grew shorter, Julie felt a tugging to extend her reach—an irresistible urge to follow the sun in its southern sky. She ventured to more distant waters in afternoons...though always within eye-shot of home.
In late August of her first year, at two o'clock in the afternoon, she snapped fully the tether of her nest and familiar hunting waters and ventured, tentatively at first, southward.
This venture wasn't the action of an anchor-less creature, carried by whims and prey. Ospreys mate for life and return annually to a home nest. The sense of place, fidelity, and home are inherent in the makeup of Julie's kind.
While her flights stretched further than any Julie had taken before, these first handful of days marked much shorter distances, 30 or so miles, than what would become a typical day's distance. But to Julie these initial days, leapfrogging river systems and watery wildlife reserves, were epic.
After four days of flight, with several days of rest between each, Julie found a temporary home in the wooded preserves of the Caesar Creek state park. Here she recharged and hunted the waters of the deep clear lake.
The freshwater fish and small land creatures of the American Midwest would have been familiar fare.
But Julie's presence, particularly in the Midwest, was by no means a given. The widespread use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide in the mid twentieth century devastated bird populations, particularly birds of prey, like Julie.
Exposure to the insecticide via the food chain reduces a bird's ability to transmit calcium in the blood to the protective shroud of an egg. Nine out of ten nests failed to produce young. Populations of Osprey, as well as other birds of prey, plummeted—virtually disappearing as clutch after clutch of delicate eggs broke during incubation.
In early October, after a month of hunting the deep banks of the Caesar Creek reservoir, Julie glided one last time over the cooling waters of her respite, banked south, and resumed her journey towards an enduring warmth.
She would fly a remarkable 700 miles in the following three days.
The sight of a vast salty sea disappearing into the horizon must have elated the young bird in a way that only creatures so deeply knitted with instinct could know.
She would never pass another day away from its view.
In 1972 the calamitous effects of DDT on bird health, along with growing alarm regarding our own health, became too clear to dismiss and was banned worldwide.
This instance is credited as one of the earliest prompts for a global and enduring focus on the care and balance required to sustain an environment supportive of life and health.
In the following decades, bird populations rebounded. Some historical habitats, however, remained empty, including the Detroit River in Southeastern Michigan.
Reintroduction programs coordinated by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and avid volunteers, have contributed greatly to replenishing these habitats with their once-familiar generational homes.
Through the next five days Julie clung to the gulf coast and Keys of Western Florida with a clockwork-like routine, beginning her flights at 2 PM and ending at 1o PM. Morning hours were spent prowling the shallow waters of the Gulf and brackish tidal marshes and waterways, filling reserves for the great distances covered each afternoon.
By mid-October Julie had crossed an expanse of the Caribbean Sea and bisected Cuba, coming to rest along a south-facing sandy shoreline backed by dense forests.
This beach was far from any center of human population. While Julie had never been an urbanite, she didn't overtly avoid the din of human settlement. In fact, she owed a great deal to a handful of these humans.
When Julie's parents began the construction of their massive home on the tip of a power pole of Detroit-based utility, DTE Energy, many in the community were concerned for the long-term safety and viability of the nest.
Jason Cousino, a millwright with DTE Energy, and local Boy Scout, Andrew Lamour, constructed a specialized platform designed to support the formidable weight of the osprey nest and erected it within the nearby Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
The nesting pair accepted the ideal new location and wasted no time in building the nest and filling it with their small family.
That spring, Julie first peered over the tangle of thatch and twigs to survey the world around her home. Her first home.
Perched along the southern edge of western Cuba, facing the vast waters of the Caribbean Sea, Julie turned abruptly east, soaring along the coasts and mountainous spines of the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola for seven days.
On the small island of Isla Beata, dangling at the southern tip of Hispaniola, Julie paused for the night.
We know this, as well as the rest of Julie's travel details, because each hour a small GPS beacon harnessed to Julie sent location information to a constellation of satellites overhead.
Designed to last two to three years, this small beacon, about the size of a 9-volt battery, was banded to Julie while she was quite young by a team of volunteers coordinated by Michigan Osprey, via a small harness atop her tawny back.
These thousands and thousands of locations are freely stored, and shared, by Movebank.
In this way, small breadcrumb locations etch away at the fog of uncertainty to reveal the remarkable perspective of a young bird.
From Isla Beata, Cuba, Julie lit out over the Caribbean toward an unseen destination. She would fly a remarkable 474 miles over open ocean, non-stop for 31 hours—the longest continuous flight of her life.
Julie arrived over a golden Maracaibo, Venezuela, just as the sun sank low behind the mountains to the west. Situated along the tidally brackish lake of the same name, this bustling South American city of 1.5 million was different than any environment Julie had ever known. She ended her 2,500-mile journey here, satiating her irresistible pull to discover the antipode of every migratory creature's dual sense of home.
Her second home.
Curiously, Julie settled in the dense suburban sprawl just outside of the central business district.
A city bird.
She fished the rich waters and marshlands of Lake Maracaibo, keeping familiar lookouts along the coast from where she would launch sorties each evening. In the heat of the day Julie rested inland, within the city.
A fixture in the skies of Maracaibo, Julie crisscrossed the dense streets, perching on utility poles, the edges of office buildings in the city center, and atop the occasional tree dotting her concrete habitat.
She made her home in a park-laden residential district overlooking the city and the lake beyond.
This was Julie's routine for eight months. Mid June would mark her first full year of life.
On June 10th, Julie fished the waters of Lake Maracaibo along the dense mangrove forest of Tierra de Sueños Park, then situated herself in her familiar perch in the city the following two days.
On June 13th, Julie's tracking unit placed her at 71.68 S, 10.69 W, an intersection within a dense community of single-story homes on the western edge of the city. There, her unit dutifully broadcast its unmoving location for three days.
At 2 pm, June 15th, Julie's beacon broadcast its final location.
There is no way of knowing, with certainty, Julie's fate. Her signal fell silent one year into her life. Ospreys typically spend two winters at their first migratory home. Cautiously optimistic eyes swept the horizon of the Detroit River the following spring awaiting, with little practical hope, Julie's return. She did not return that spring, or any spring thereafter.
What is certain is the incredible calling that pulled within her small heart, to answer the ancient whisper of journey, of distance, of home. Julie's journey, as unlikely as it was, is undertaken each year by those of her kind—traveling great distances over a rapidly changing landscape to winter homes, and returning to meet or reunite with their mates.
The journey of one small creature in this vast dance can appear to be an impossibly minor piece of an interwoven system. These movements, synced to the very orbit of a planet around its sun, are as vast, and old, as life itself. But all systems are simply the full measure of small beings doing what they must. The migration of any creature, of Julie, driven by instinct and will, is remarkable.
This is the earth, as Julie knew it...
