Perched on a ladder 20 feet in the air, Gina Purtell uses a rake to clear trash, leaves, and built-up bird excrement from the top of an osprey nest. The nest, a manmade box on stilts lodged in the marshes of the Westport River, is little more than an AirBnb for the migratory osprey that furnish it each spring and summer.
It’s Purtell’s job to clean up the mess once the birds leave in winter. Each osprey’s taste is different, she said.
“These guys sure liked their gloves,” Purtell notes, holding up a single, dirt-caked gardener’s glove.
For decades, Purtell has monitored the osprey population along the Westport River, first as an employee of MassAudubon South Coast and now as the community engagement director for the Westport River Watershed Alliance. From the ospreys’ arrival in March to their departure in August, Purtell and her team of volunteers count the ospreys, the pairs, the eggs, and the chicks that survive to young adulthood.
This year, monitors found that most of the osprey chicks died this summer. Chick mortality jumped from 37% in 2024 to 82% in 2026, the highest mortality rate since Purtell began monitoring. In the Chesapeake Bay and across the East Coast, researchers observed a similar phenomenon.
“They’re starving in their nests,” Purtell said.
Menhaden, a tiny, oily, bait fish, may be to blame.
When osprey arrive in New England each spring, they load up on Atlantic herring, a small, silvery baitfish that travels upstream each spring to spawn. By summer, when they lay their eggs and have to feed their young, the herring are long gone, and the menhaden typically come to take their place.
Menhaden are an ideal food source for young osprey because of their high fat content. It also makes them an ideal species for fish oil production, a business spurring commercial fishing operations from Virginia up to Canada.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the regulatory body that sets quotas and catch limits for menhaden, is meeting in Newport this week to consider a new menhaden quota for next year. Conservationists and researchers hope to reduce the quota by at least 40%, arguing that menhaden are being overfished and the osprey are proof.
The issue goes beyond the charismatic coastal sea hawk, said Purtell; larger fish, birds, and mammals of all kinds rely on menhaden for food.
“This isn’t an osprey story,” Purtell said. “It’s an ecosystem story.”
Missing schools
When the English first arrived on Massachusetts’ South Coast, the large number of ospreys led them to call the inlet Buzzards Bay — “buzzard” being the English term for hawk.
Today, ospreys are far fewer, but on a cautious rebound, thanks to efforts like Purtell’s and the proliferation of coastal bird boxes that give the osprey a place to nest.
When osprey chicks suddenly begin to starve in their nests, the tragedy isn’t just those lost chicks, Purtell said. It’s a sign that the entire ecosystem may be off-kilter.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will decide, likely Tuesday, on a new menhaden quota for the 2027 to 2029 fishing years. Last year, the commission reduced the menhaden quota by 20% — but activists say the measure did not go far enough.
Charter fisherman Jason Colby agrees. The Westport-based captain of Little Sister Charters spends just about every day on the water — particularly in the late summer when menhaden are most active in coastal waters. He calls menhaden, a popular bait for sport fish such as striped bass, “the most important fish in the sea.”
“The population of menhaden is a disaster. And it’s only going to get worse if they keep doing what they’re doing.”
— Jason Colby, charter fisherman
Colby blamed regulators for not allowing the menhaden population time to grow, and he predicted it wouldn’t be long before menhaden went the way of the famously overfished Atlantic cod. Growing up in Long Island, Colby used to see adult menhaden get up to three pounds. Today, most barely reach one pound before they get pulled up in a net, he said.
But who is netting up all of the menhaden? Activists and researchers, Colby included, pointed fingers at one fish oil conglomerate.
Omega Protein is a fish oil manufacturer and reduction fishery plant based in Virginia and owned by the Canadian company Cooke Inc. Ocean Harvesters is the 30-boat commercial fishing fleet that catches menhaden for Omega Protein using the purse-seine method, a highly efficient net meant to capture entire schools of fish at once.
“The population of menhaden is a disaster,” Colby said. “And it’s only going to get worse if they keep doing what they’re doing.”
Ben Landry, vice president of public affairs for Ocean Fleet Services, the parent company of Ocean Harvesters, said in a statement to the Washington Post that the blame on the menhaden fishery for osprey starvation was “an oversimplified explanation” for a complex issue with many causes, such as predators, water conditions, and changes in habitats. Ocean Harvesters says current science shows the population is not being overfished, and its CEO, Monty Deihl, has expressed appreciation for ongoing research from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science on the menhaden fishery.
Colby recalled seeing a boat this October take up 100,000 fish that appeared to be juveniles. He’s seen ospreys travel farther and farther out to sea, criss-crossing the skies, only to return with empty talons.
“That’s an awful long way to go to get nothing,” Colby said.
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
