Sasanoa River, Maine

Today's star was the chick in the Bridge Nest - I don't think she's fledged, but looking at those wings, I think it won't be long! We don't have an exact date for hatching, but the adults appeared to be feeding a tiny chick on June 24 - and if that was the day the chick hatched, she's now 53 days old, which is prime time for a chick to fledge, or take his/her first flight.

By the way - I really didn't climb up the bridge structure to get these pictures - I have a wonderful Canon PowerShot SX50 HS with image stablilization that lets me take these shots from quite a ways back, trading a bit of sharpness for the part where it only weights a bit over a pound and I don't use a tripod (though I do hold my breath!).

The first two pictures were on the other side of the road from the nest; for this one I've crossed over to the nest side, and moved a bit out onto the bridge, though not as far as Charlie. You may need to click the picture to full size to see the nest in this wide-angle shot - but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to include a boat sailing by. And perhaps the chick had some comments for the crew!

There was no one at home at the osprey nest I'll call the Sasanoa Platform nest to distinguish it from this nest on the Bridge - it's off to the right from my perspective in the picture with the sailboat, and the platform where the eagles nest is a bit further out that way. We also don't know exactly when the chicks hatched at that nest, but my guess is around May 30-June 1, so they'd be about 11 weeks old - and while we were away for several weeks and didn't see them fledge, I'm guessing they've been flying for 3 weeks or so. In previous years it was common for the fledglings to perch on the branches of a dead tree beside the tree with the platform, and I didn't want to go out far enough on the bridge to check there as I didn't want to get into the bridge chick's safety zone - so we decided to take a quick look from the other side of the river - roughly at the right edge of the picture with the sailboat. Back before there was a bridge, there used to be a ferry to get across the Sasanoa from Woolwich to Arrowsic, and there's a bit of a road leading to the water where the ferry used to land.

Here are two versions of the picture I took looking across the river from the Woolwich side to the Arrowsic side where we usually stand; both click bigger, and the un-clicked version of the second picture shows the tree where the platform osprey perch with an insert showing the nest (which wasn't visible in the larger picture no matter what tricks I tried, and the zoomed in view didn't really show anything but an empty nest so not worthy of its own big clickable picture).

And again, because we don't often see the bridge from this perspective, here's a view from the bank, with an arrow showing the tiny bump that is Bridge Chick - and you might actually be able to see her if you click bigger. In case you can't, the second picture in this pair shows her from the bank, though she wasn't really presenting a good profile while we were watching.

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If you'd like to see additional pictures from this nest, and from the osprey nests "around the corner" on the Sasanoa River, you can use the link for my Local Wildlife Home Page at the top of the page to see an index to all the visits.