High hopes for the fish-eating hawk

BROADLOUGH is a shallow coastal lagoon on the river Vartry just south of Wicklow town. There, on a sunny day last October, I encountered one of the great hopefuls of Irish ornithology; an osprey.

This fish-eating hawk goes to Africa for the winter and it was unusual to see one so late in the year. The bird was probably from Scotland, where the return of ospreys has been one of the great conservation success stories of the last 50 years. Could a similar revival occur here?

The name ‘osprey’ comes from ‘ossifraga’, meaning ‘bone breaker’. Ospreys eat fish, not bones. Somewhere along the line, the bird became confused with the lamergeier, the great bearded vulture of the Pyrenees, which can have one end of a bone digesting in its stomach while the other end protrudes from its bill.