Osprey restoration continues along shores of Clear Lake

(Above) A look inside the Osprey hack box located on the grounds of the Iowa Baptist Camp on the north shore of Clear Lake.  Last week the hack box doors were opened, allowing the Osprey free flight to hopefully become some of the first modern day nesters in the Clear Lake area.-Reporter photo by Chris Barragy.

by Ron Andrews

Retired DNR Wildlife Biologist

In the continuing efforts to get a pair of ospreys to nest in the Clear Lake area, three more birds were placed in the hack box this past week at the Iowa Baptist Camp along the north shore of Clear Lake.  And now after a week, the hack box doors have been open allowing them free flight to hopefully become some of the first modern day nesters in the Clear Lake area.

This has been an ongoing effort for the past decade, but so far Clear Lake has not scored as far as nesting ospreys are concerned.  Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Diversity Technician Pat Schlarbaum has been relentlously working with Minnesota Energy, taking the osprey from nests in Minnesota in hopes that one day a pair will nest in our vicinity, as well as elsewhere in the state.  As of this past summer, a modern day record 24 osprey nests have been established in Iowa.    

       An Earth Week Activity that excited the heart of this writer was the placement of two new osprey nesting platforms on the south side of Clear Lake.  Ever since my wife, Martha, and I spent a night in the Osprey Hack Box about eight years ago, I have been hoping and planning to place two higher osprey nesting platforms to entice migrating osprey to stop and set up housekeeping activities and rear a family of young ospreys in the Clear Lake vicinity.  A Hack Box is a place where flightless young, approximately 42-days-old, are raised to flight stage and then turned loose to migrate south.  Thanks to Michels Powers, a corporation that replaces utility poles for Alliant Energy and other similar companies, the feat of placing two 40-foot poles with nesting platforms attached, was accomplished.

It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child.  It took a bunch of partners, several villages, to get this pulled off.  One pole was planted on the Nature Conservancy’s Clausen’s Cove and the other pole was planted on Tom and Jan Lovell’s property, both on

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the south side of Clear Lake.  I know I will forget to include them all but here are just a few of the involved partners: the DNR’s Wildlife Diversity Team, the Nature Conservancy, the Iowa Heritage Foundation, and historically when we first brought Osprey to be hacked to Clear Lake, it took the Clear Lake Baptist Camp, the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Minnesota Energy, Wisconsin’s Dairyland Power, the DNR’s Clear Lake Fisheries personnel, Clear Lake Telephone Company,  Rich Finstad of Clear Lake Frontier Labs, Clear Mayor Nelson Crabb coordinator, and several other folks who contributed money, and volunteered their time and energy to feed and observed the young until they reached flight stage.  There are many unsung heroes that have the passion to make the earth and the environment a better place and that is why such restorations take place.  That is why the DNR attempts to bring back several compatible species that have long since been extirpated from the state.

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