The latest from my Scientific American series, East of Siberia:
In autumn, 2012, hunters found a young osprey wandering the forest of coastal Primorye. Whereas most of these fish-eating raptors had long flown south for the winter this one walked, dragging its broken wing behind it through the fallen leaves. The hunters chased the bird down, put it in a cardboard box, and brought it to Sergei, a colleague of mine they knew worked for a bird-conservation NGO. By the time the raptor reached him, however, the broken wing had fused. The osprey would never fly again.
I saw this bird for the first time a few weeks later when, checking camera traps to monitor poaching activity along the Maksimovka River, I happened upon Sergei at a field camp. He was there guiding a group of Japanese naturalists on a tour of the region. With no one to leave the osprey with at home, Sergei had brought the bird along, keeping it regularly fed with fish. As a keen angler himself, this was an arrangement that suited both man and bird well. In fact, when I arrived, I saw the large raptor sitting on a stump on the edge of camp, minding its own business, slowly devouring a trout Sergei had recently caught and hand delivered.
Ospreys are uncommon in Primorye. I’d only occasionally seen these fish specialists over the years—adults hovering, then diving for mullet or redfin in the brackish waters of river mouths along the Sea of Japan. And I’d never seen a young one before. From my vantage point across Sergei’s camp, it looked quite different from an adult but had the similar, familiar, black-and-white plumage pattern that adults did.
About a week later I saw the bird again, when Sergei’s caravan of naturalists came to the village of Ternei, where I worked at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s research center. I had offered to describe my work with Blakiston’s fish owls to them and Sergei brought the osprey, perched calmly on his arm, inside the building.
I took a look at this bird under the artificial light of the entryway. The bill didn’t seem right—not blunt and hooked like it should have been—and the whole body shape seemed off. As I scrutinized the bird a little closer it wasn’t long before the osprey farce was obvious. This was not an osprey! It bore only the most superficial resemblance to one.
Jonathan C. Slaght 