Ordinarily, you'd need a good pair of binoculars and a day off work to get up close and personal with nesting birds of prey, but with Osprey Cam, you can enjoy some bird watching on your lunch break.
Osprey Cam, which you can view below, is the result of a partnership between Colorado's Pitkin County Open Space and Trails and Aspen Center for Environmental Studies and first went live in 2016. The wildlife camera is installed on a pole adjacent to an active Osprey nest in Emma Open Space, a riparian ecosystem near Aspen.
The camera streams live footage each spring and summer, delighting wildlife enthusiasts by broadcasting the real-time activities of a pair of nesting Ospreys that return to this nest each year to breed.
According to Pitkin County's Osprey Cam page, Ospreys mate for life once finding a partner, and nesting pairs return to the same nest every year. Some nests can be more than 70 years old and are used by multiple successive generations.
Ospreys are migratory birds of prey that are found on every continent except Antarctica. Their populations represent one of the most successful environmental conservation stories in North American history, having rebounded following the ban on the pesticide DDT which was banned 50 years ago after it was discovered to be affecting birds of prey.
Osprey eggs have an incubation period of about 5 weeks and new hatchlings typically live in the next for eight to 10 weeks before taking flight, so viewers have a long summer of watching the chicks grow while the male Osprey fetches food for the family before Fat Bear Week returns to captivate us.
