When I got to the beach this afternoon, there were a bunch of pelicans sitting on the jetty, and a few were diving in the water:
CBF, New Study Links Starving Chesapeake Bay Osprey to Menhaden Woes
A new peer-reviewed study links unprecedented levels of starving osprey chicks in the Chesapeake Bay to concerns around menhaden, a nutrient-packed fish that is a key food source for osprey and many other species.
While several factors influence osprey productivity, reduced availability of Atlantic menhaden is likely the primary driver of poor osprey reproduction in saltier parts of the Chesapeake Bay, according to the study. The new report is based on data from the 2024 nesting season and published this week in Frontiers in Marine Science by researchers at the College of William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Maryland National-Capital Park and Planning Commission, and the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center.
Research in recent years has documented osprey chicks starving in nests across portions of the Chesapeake Bay where osprey primarily rely on menhaden for food. Osprey in many parts of the region are reproducing at rates well below what’s needed to sustain the population.
Virginia is the only state along the Atlantic coast that still allows industrial menhaden fishing in state waters. That lone remaining industrial operation—Omega Protein and their fishing partner Ocean Harvesters—extracts over 100 million pounds of menhaden from Chesapeake Bay waters each year, with no scientific understanding of the impacts to the Bay’s ecology or coastal communities.
Widespread osprey nesting failures are among several warning signs that the menhaden population is struggling in the Bay, including plummeting catches by small-scale watermen who catch menhaden for bait for local crab fisheries.
In a 2025 letter to state fishery regulators, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science suggested the Virginia Marine Resources Commission give “serious consideration to reducing purse seine fishing in Chesapeake Bay,” given that data to understand impacts of concentrating the industrial menhaden fishery in Virginia waters remains “woefully inadequate.”
The new study notes that “a large degree of uncertainty remains about the status of adult menhaden within the Chesapeake Bay.” It adds, “To more fully resolve this uncertainty, assessments of menhaden abundance could enhance understanding of their role within the ecosystem and support management of consumers that depend on them.”
As part of the budget process that will wrap up later this month, Virginia legislators are considering investing in Chesapeake Bay menhaden research. These data are crucial to understanding the impacts of highly concentrated industrial harvests and how many menhaden a healthy Chesapeake Bay requires.
Recent polling shows that 80 percent of Virginia voters support state funding for a menhaden study.
Well, "Science" has spoken. I suspect the study was designed to find this. Unfortunately that's the way this thing tends to work, at least as long a I was in science.
On the other hand, I see less Ospreys around our neck of the woods these days. Oh, they're here, but not in the numbers that they were several years ago.
With Taylor Carpenter
Blue and gold macaws are not native to Caracas. But over the past two decades their numbers in Venezuela's capital have skyrocketed, with hundreds of these birds now flying freely across the city, and dazzling locals with their colorful feathers and peculiar calls.
The birds have become a symbol of Caracas and formed a special bond with some people, who leave food for them in their balconies or gardens. But this unique relationship between humans and exotic birds is now under threat as city authorities cut down the palm trees that the macaws depend on to raise their offspring.
Maria Lourdes Gonzalez, a biologist who studies the macaws says that in the following years, the city's population of blue and gold macaws could plummet. "If they don't find a place where they can breed, there will be no new generation of macaws" she said at her office in Caracas' Simon Bolivar University.
Gonzalez explained that the macaws only nest in a palm tree known as the chaguaramo, or the royal palm. And they only use chaguaramos with no leaves whose trunks are decaying and have been partially hollowed out by insects.
Officials are taking these old palm trees down in several parks and public spaces as they try to beautify the city ,and prevent rotting tree trunks from falling on people. It's a policy that makes sense from the perspective of a city planner, Gonzalez explained, but one that threatens the macaws.
"These are not birds that make nests out of branches or twigs," Gonzalez said. "They occupy holes inside old tree trunks, and in Caracas, they only use the chaguaramo trees."
At the Slower Maryland Chronic, Lusby Resident Reports Mass Rockfish Die-Off at Calvert Cliffs Beach
A longtime Lusby resident and candidate for Calvert County Commissioner has reported observing multiple mass mortality events along the shoreline of Calvert Cliffs State Park in February 2026, documenting large numbers of dead mature rockfish, blue crabs, double-crested cormorants, seagulls, and other marine life between the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant and the Cove Point LNG facility.
Patrick E. Flaherty, who has hiked the park nearly daily for 15 years, including through severe winter conditions, first noted the incidents in February. On February 23 alone, he captured 118 photographs of the affected area. The die-offs involved rockfish measuring 25–30 inches or larger, along with substantial numbers of crabs and birds, including approximately 8–10 double-crested cormorants and various seagulls.
Flaherty forwarded details to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), which responded promptly and initiated an investigation. He plans to follow up this week with the assigned field investigator for any updates on findings or potential causes. He emphasized the significance of these events given rockfish—Maryland’s state fish—already experiencing serious population declines due to factors like habitat challenges and fishing pressures. The incidents raise concerns for commercial watermen, recreational anglers, and broader Chesapeake Bay ecosystem health.
The affected shoreline lies near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant and the Dominion Energy Cove Point LNG export terminal, a stretch now under consideration for a proposed major Amazon data center development. Flaherty provided a press release outlining his observations and offered to share high-resolution photos for review. He included sample images showing dead rockfish and crabs next to a dog collar radio controller measuring 7.5 inches for scale.
No public statements from MDE or other agencies have confirmed the cause of the reported die-offs as of March 3, 2026. Maryland’s Fish Kill Investigation Program, managed by MDE, handles reports of dead or distressed aquatic life, attributing such events to factors like natural water chemistry changes, low oxygen levels, biological shifts, pollution, or other human-related activities. Reports can be directed to MDE at 800-285-8195 during business hours.
Right after the ice left the beach, Georgia and I walked the beach, and saw a large number of sea ducks, Surf Scoters and Bluebills dead on the beach. Georgia counted 16 dead birds between the harbor, and the boat ramp at Calvert Beach. Curiously, none that I saw were the two species of sea ducks we commonly see offshore, the Buffleheads and Old Squaw (yes, I'm that old and stubborn). I did see a single large dead striper, but that doesn't strike me as that unusual.
Initially, I was concerned that it might be bird flu hitting the ducks, but the fact that it encompasses so many different and unrelated animals makes me suspect it was a consequence of the extreme cold that we had in late Feb. Why so many more other animals washed up on Calvert Cliffs beach a few miles south I'll leave open for speculation; I don't understand.
A cloudy, but relatively warm day for January. The tide was pretty low, so I made it way up the beach, and the Tundra Swans were up there, standing around in the shallow water. 
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Tundra swans breed in the Arctic during warmer months. In North America, they are grouped into Eastern and Western populations. The Eastern band travels more than 4,000 miles to winter in coastal areas from Maryland to North Carolina — mostly the latter nowadays.
Annual surveys conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service typically count 90,000-100,000 birds in the Eastern population, but their numbers unexpectedly dropped from a record high of 137,000 in 2023 to a 45-year low of 64,000 in 2024. Wildlife officials chalk up that decline to normal annual variation and not to any specific factors or threats.
As recently as the 1960s, the tundra swan population in North Carolina only numbered in the low thousands. In recent decades, the state has averaged approximately 65,000-75,000 wintering tundra swans, mostly in and immediately around the neck of land between the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, Morris said. He suspects that the birds found the region more hospitable after many of its forests were plowed under for cropland, offering them a ready food source. “We had swans, but nothing anywhere near like it is now,” he said.
But that influx might not have happened if not for concurrent changes in the Chesapeake Bay’s fragile ecosystem, according to Morris and other experts.
The Bay’s water quality had been on the decline for many years largely because of increasing nutrient and sediment pollution flowing off city streets, suburban yards and farm fields during heavy rain. The biggest turning point came in 1972, when the remnants of Hurricane Agnes triggered widespread flooding and a multi-decade downturn in the Bay’s health.
The cloudy water in the Bay and its tributaries smothered much of the underwater grasses that had fed and nourished generations of tundra swans, said Kayla Harvey, waterfowl program manager for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. As their preferred food dwindled, tundra swans began feeding in farm fields on waste grains, such as corn and soybeans.
By the 1980s and ’90s, North Carolina surpassed the Chesapeake as the population’s most important wintering ground.
Hunting pressure doesn’t appear to have impeded that trend. While Maryland legislators tried to legalize hunting the birds, arguing that it would bring in permit revenue, the bill died in committee. North Carolina, though, is among 10 states (including Delaware and Virginia in the Bay watershed) where tundra swan hunting is allowed. Because North Carolina has the largest population, the state receives the lion’s share of the federally allocated permits for the Eastern region — usually around 4,800 of the 5,600 total.
Bringing more tundra swans back to the Chesapeake will require continued efforts to revive its ecosystem, Harvey said. The biggest determinant will be increasing underwater grasses through actions such as direct seeding and improving water quality to support more growth, she added.
There used to be a pretty reliable small flock of Tundra Swans that occupied the shallow bar area between Matoaka Cottages and Western Shores to the north of us for the winter season. In the the last few years, I would say 5 or so, there have been only the occasional swan up there. I think I only saw a couple of them up there once this winter.
It's curious that they seem to be blaming a recent decline in the swans in the Bay region to water quality, which the Bay program would insist has seen a measurable, if small improvement due to the $25 billion or so spent to clean up the bay.
The emphasis on SAV seems misplaced too. In North Carolina, their increase is credited to more farming, Could it be the decline here could due to a decrease in farming, and an increase in suburbs
Meeting the Chesapeake Bay’s underwater grass restoration goal could soon get more difficult.
The state-federal Bay Program partnership may increase its goal for underwater grasses, an important habitat for blue crabs and many other species, from 185,000 to 196,000 acres.
Even the smaller of those numbers is more than double what’s been observed in the Bay in recent years, and the region has never come close to the 185,000-acre figure since Baywide measurements of the grass beds — officially called submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV — began in the early 1980s.
Nonetheless, scientists and state officials say the goal should be updated to better reflect the amount of potential SAV habitat if the region meets its pollution reduction goals in the future.
The Bay Program established the 185,000 figure in 2003 using photographs from aerial surveys conducted during the 1900s — mostly old agricultural surveys — to map the location of all grass beds that could be seen in different parts of the Bay at some point in time.
Brooke Landry, a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and chair of the Bay Program’s Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Workgroup, said that when the original maps were drawn, portions of some shoreline grass beds were inadvertently cut off in the mapping process, resulting in an underestimation of the observed amount.
Also, grass beds have been observed in recent years in some locations where they had not been previously mapped.
When those areas are included, the extent of Bay bottom that supports SAV, or is known to have done so at some point in the last century, increased to about 196,000 acres.
That updated figure is being proposed as a goal for the revised Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, the policy document that guides Bay restoration efforts, which is being updated this year.
Landry acknowledged that meeting the goal will be difficult. While 196,000 acres of the Bay may have supported SAV at some point in time, it’s unclear whether that much ever existed in any single year during the past century.
The greatest extent of grass beds observed in recent decades was about 108,000 acres in 2018. Since then, the amount observed in annual aerial surveys has ranged from roughly 63,000 to 83,000 acres.
So we're nowhere near the current goal, and they're proposing to increase the goals for the next go around. Seems like a pretty sure way to achieve failure the next time around. And do we really have any specific mechanism proposed to increase SAV, beyond further restricting nutrients?
The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: The Last Champion of Cracker Barrel up at the Other McCain.
