“If that was a horned owl or a goshawk, there would be serious trouble,” said Rob Domenech, moments before the colossal raptor took a steep dive at his research partner. “Oh. Hope I didn't speak too soon.”
Raised high into the air on a boom truck, Heiko Langner, director of the University of Montana's environmental biogeochemistry lab, kept his cool Thursday morning as he fastidiously removed a pair of month-old chicks from a cloth sack and returned them to their nest, unharmed but sporting new ankle bracelets engraved with serial numbers.
A dive bomb is pretty standard fare, though, when a team of researchers is banding, clipping and sticking osprey chicks. And aside from the rotting fish carcass that one volunteer stuck his hand into, the day went along without a hitch (fortunately, Domenech carries a bottle of hand sanitizer).
Domenech is a raptor biologist and president of Missoula's Raptor View Research Institute, one of the most successful eagle-banding operations in the nation.
Last year, Domenech and UM professor Erick Greene started talking about Missoula's relative abundance of osprey, yet its dearth of scientific studies tracking the birds' behavior.
“We're really fortunate that osprey are fairly common around here, and yet there's been no long-term studies on osprey around Missoula,” Greene said. “So a few of us got together and became very excited about starting some osprey work around here.”
Now in its infancy, the osprey study's first goal was to begin investigating some fairly common questions: How many osprey are nesting in the Missoula Valley? How many active nesting platforms exist here? And why are osprey so attracted to bailing twine, which strangles dozens of fledging chicks each year?
The study also engages Missoula students through the Flagship Program, which provides hundreds of free after-school activities to 4,000 students in Missoula public schools.
By involving local students, Domenech and Greene can employ a small army to assist with monitoring the birds, taking census, building databases and even installing remote videocameras on nesting platforms so classes can have a bird's-eye view of osprey behavior.
“One of our ultimate fantasies is to get satellite transmitters, so students can click on a Web site and see where their bird is wintering,” Greene said.
Nobody really knows where Missoula's osprey population spends its winters, except that they're almost certainly sunbathing somewhere between northern Mexico and the southern tip of South America.
“We want to know if all osprey from Missoula winter in a restrictive place in South America,” Greene said. “Do they spread out? Do they migrate as a family? We just don't have those answers.”
By embarking on short afternoon field trips, Domenech hopes the students will eventually have enough data to develop an informational pamphlet for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
The group has already mapped the coordinates of more than a dozen nesting platforms, erected by utility companies to give osprey alternative - safe - nesting sites.
“The platforms are usually set up in areas where osprey have nested on live power poles and have caused problems,” Domenech said. “Next spring, we'll get the kids out to monitor the nests when the osprey start coming back from wintering grounds.”
Domenech said the students have already been helpful in observing what nests have been removed by utility companies, which are allowed to tinker with nests only if no eggs have been laid. If there are eggs in a potentially hazardous nest, companies must wait until a problem occurs.
The project took on a more serious note when heightened levels of mercury were found recently in 12 bald eagles in Montana, killing two of the birds.
On Thursday, much to the chagrin of the adult osprey, Domenech and his crew poked around in three separate nests.
The study site extends to property just west of Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.'s Frenchtown mill, and the crew focused on two of those nests, as well as a nest on private land near Kelly Island.
Brett Walker, a doctoral student in wildlife biology at UM, Dave Taylor, of Dave Taylor Roofing Inc. (Taylor furnished the group with two separate boom trucks to access the nests), and Langner, the lab director, helped collect six chicks, tag the birds with metal bands, clip feathers and draw blood samples.
Because the first two chicks were the smallest and still had too much natal down for Domenech to locate a vein, the team could only obtain blood samples from four of the chicks.
Over the next month, Langner will test the blood and feather samples for trace metals like mercury. Eventually, the group hopes to have data from osprey that feed exclusively in the Clark Fork River, as well as “control specimens” - birds who feed in cleaner bodies of water like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot rivers.
“Osprey are environmental canaries because they are at the top of the aquatic food chain,” Greene said. “The osprey are fishing in the Clark Fork, and we're downstream from one of the largest Superfund sites in the country. Right below Milltown Dam are a lot of heavy metals, which end up in the stoneflies, which then get eaten by the bull trout and the suckers, which are then eaten by osprey.”
And while mercury is the elemental heavy metal the group is testing for in its study, mercury, cadmium, copper and arsenic are all common metals in the sediment behind Milltown Dam.
Greene has had a long and prosperous affair with osprey.
In the 1970s and '80s, when there were still high levels of the pesticide DDT in the environment, Greene studied osprey in Nova Scotia.
“The DDT was getting bioamplified up the food chain,” Greene said. “It had been so widely applied everywhere, it was running into the water and working its way up the food chain.”
Because osprey are specialists and eat only fish, their populations crashed when the birds' eggs started to thin and break.
A 1972 ban of DDT, coupled with increased federal protection, helped rebuild the osprey population nationwide.
“We're really just starting to recover from one sort of contaminant put there by people, so it's very germane now, especially because of what they're finding in bald eagles, to really start paying attention,” Greene said.
Reporter Tristan Scott can be reached at 523-5264 or at tscott@missoulian.com.
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