Russell Jenkins Stoop Files

When I was a kid, I read old yellowing pages about the effects of the agricultural chemical DDT on raptors such as Ospreys and Peregrine Falcons. The birds ingested the chemical via their diet and it caused the thinning of their eggshells. The rate they were disappearing, it was unlikely they’d see the new century. 

I remember seeing my first Osprey sitting high up on a dead tree at the side of the Tingalpa Reservoir, Capalaba, (Queensland, Australia) during the hot mid-afternoon sun on Christmas Day in 1988. I was thrilled and took almost a whole roll of film with my Pentax K1000 and Sigma 80-250mm lens. I think my photos just looked like a grey match stick – the stem of the branch with a grey round blob at the end of it. (Maybe expensive slide film such as Ektachrome).

In the last week of March this year, 2024, I was standing at the edge of the Fukushimagata (wetlands) in Niigata, and I saw an osprey overhead. No big deal anymore. They are resident at the wetlands, and I am used to seeing them. However, after that osprey went by, another one came from another direction. I was lining up a circling bird to photograph it when another crossed its path with a large fish. I was just there for about two hours and saw a continuous flow of busy ospreys. The wetlands are surrounded by vast, then empty rice fields that had just thawed from the winter, and the ospreys crossed the fields at random. I went for a walk away from the wetland area and I saw one osprey hurrying over my left shoulder towards the water, and as I turned to watch it, I saw another one passing over me with another fish. I took it for granted and just visited twice. I think it rained on the Tuesday, but I saw it all happening again on the Wednesday. I visited again on the Friday and stood there for four hours, but didn’t see one. The flurry had finished. It was pretty amazing to see in Japan, twenty-four years into the new century. If I think back to 1988, I had no idea, I’d ever see such a thing.