Ospreys nest comfortably in Revere

REVERE – Five years after it closed, Wonderland Dog Track has some new tenants ? but tenants of the feathered variety, as a pair of ospreys has built a nest on a light tower in the former race track’s parking lot.”They’re probably doing what we call housekeeping,” said David Rimmer, director of land stewardship at the Essex County Greenbelt and the manager of the land trust’s osprey program. “It’s a dry run, it’s a bit of a practice session, a chance to learn the ropes of nest building … it’s not uncommon for osprey to be four or five years old before they successfully nest.”Ospreys are large, brown-and-white hawks identified by a dark eye stripe on a white head, long wings that look bent and are held downward when flying, and a distinct dark elbow patch on the white underside of their wings. The birds can often be seen hunting in shallow marshes and along the coast, and will fold back their wings and dive head first toward the water before sticking out their legs at the last instant to grab a fish.But like the bald eagle, the species was decimated by the pesticide DDT, which accumulated in the fish the birds ate and prevented the birds from producing eggshells hard enough to withstand incubation. By the time DDT was banned in the early 1970s, the osprey population had decreased by 90 percent, Rimmer said. To help the birds recover, organizations have erected wooden nesting platforms in prime osprey habitat along the coast. But the birds will take anyplace elevated and with a good view of their surroundings, a stable base on which to construct an ever-growing nest of sticks, and ready access to hunting habitat.In some places, the birds have gotten a little creative in their sites, nesting on floating navigational marker waterways, on utility poles and even last year on the catwalk of the Wheelabrator smoke stack. Now, a pair has constructed a roughly four-foot high nest in a tower with eight floodlights that illuminate the parking lot at Wonderland Dog Track.Phil Romano, who is renting out some space at Wonderland, said Friday that he first noticed the birds about three weeks earlier when they were carrying branches to the light tower.”I don’t see them taking any twigs?” Romano noted, amazed at the size of the nest.Rimmer said he hasn’t physically been to the site but on viewing pictures from The Item, he suspected one of two things.Due to the late start date for the nest – it takes about six weeks for ospreys to hatch eggs and another six weeks to raise the young, Rimmer said – he did not think the pair would be raising a family on the light tower. More likely, the pair either failed at another nesting site and are trying to start over or are a young pair trying out the whole nesting thing for the first time.But ospreys typically mate for life and return to the same nesting site each year, so there may be some chicks in the future. And the mere presence of the pair shows how ospreys have rebounded in population.Rimmer said that 20 years ago, there were only a couple of osprey pairs in Essex County and none in Suffolk County. Today, there are osprey pairs nesting from Salisbury to East Boston and there is at least a single nest in almost every single coastal town north of Boston. In the last six to eight years, the population has grown from 10 nesting pairs to 30 nesting pairs north of Boston.As for the Wonderland pair, they may be some of the early colonizers.”I could see in three or four years from now, a bunch more platforms down there and a couple of more pairs kicking around, because the habitat is there for them,” Rimmer said.Even if they choose to live in a parking lot at Wonderland.”It’s encouraging that somebody is putting the property to good use,” said Chip Tuttle, the chief operating officer of Suffolk Downs, which owns the former racetrack property. “As we move forward with development plans with the city of Revere, we will keep the current residents in mind.”For more information on ospreys living north of Bosto