An Osprey in the Biltmore

I looked up in the sky and saw a bright, white silhouette, gleaming far away in the late afternoon sunlight.  My first thought was of a balloon, perhaps of the Sino spy variety.  However what were the odds another one would float over the United States so soon and so brazenly?  And the shape was all wrong, pointed and oblong.  Still it lumbered slowly, steadily like a glider, mechanically looping over a small area to the south of my Biltmore community.  

Of course I soon recognized it as a bird.  My zoom lens conveniently handy, I snapped a couple of shots to definitively identify it.  Red-tailed hawks frequently soar overhead, riding the thermals in wide arcs as they focus on prey hundreds of feet below on the local golf course.  White egrets and great blue herons occasionally traverse the neighborhood skies on their peregrinations along the local canal and between several manmade lakes.  However this bird was none of those: instead an osprey, another common bird in Phoenix, but an uncommonly rare sighting so close to my own yard. 

Its wingspan bends in the shape of an M, distinguishing the osprey from other raptors.  It's also unique because the bird hunts for prey in water, which in my hometown means along waterways like the Salt River and the bodies of water it feeds including Tempe Town Lake and the Arizona and Grand Canals.  I've also seen the species at some of our recreational spots' lakes, notably in Papago Park.  However, I've never seen one at the ponds that landscape the Biltmore Lakes, an adjacent community to my own.  And I don't recall ever seeing one at the larger Granada Park lakes almost a mile away.  

The Arizona Canal runs right through the heart of the Biltmore, defining the southern edge of the historic Biltmore Hotel property.  Every winter, Salt River Project, a local power and water utility, stops the water flow in that section of the canal for maintenance.  The bird life that takes advantage of the life-sustaining flow changes dramatically during that month-long period when mallards and seasonal visitors like goldeneyes are often replaced by sandpipers and killdeers that forage in the shallow puddles that remain.  Even the mix of flycatchers seem to change when black phoebes are joined by the much larger Say's phoebes and more colorful vermillion flycatchers.  I've also noticed yellow-rumped warblers poking around in whatever water still pools. 

The canal was on my mind as I observed the osprey soar several hundred feet overhead.  I've seen one along the canal before around two miles away near Indian School Road, but never this far north and west.  Why was the bird in my neighborhood, over the 17th or 18th hole of the Links golf course?  Was it following a dry waterway in the hope of eventually finding underwater prey?  Or better, was it seeking fish already swimming in the channel?  Ultimately I theorized that after its winter pause, the canal was once again flowing, the osprey a harbinger of the sudden change.

Sure enough the next day, on my early morning run that begins on the Arizona Canal near the resort, I saw that the channel was delivering water.  Two days later I also saw that northern rough-winged swallows had returned along the waterway after a month-long absence, hunting for invisible-to-my eye insects.  Even more, I witnessed at least a dozen cormorants, birds I hadn't seen at all this winter.  Some were diving and surfacing with fish in their beaks, a sure sign that the waterway was once again well stocked with sustenance for even a hungry osprey.

My runs are usually early enough to catch sight of one or two black-crowned night herons finishing their nocturnal foraging.  Later in the morning I might spy a belted kingfisher on a power line as it peers into the canal.  Of course I've not encountered any of them in several weeks because of the empty channel.  With the water flowing again, I'll be on the lookout for those birds, along with a brand new one, the osprey. 

Osprey in my Biltmore neighborhood.

Osprey in my Biltmore neighborhood.

Osprey in my Biltmore neighborhood.