Heartbreak and Hope

The last photo we have of the partner on the long weekend of May, 2018.

In one month, the osprey return to the nest on our property. For ten years, since April of 2009, a pair of ospreys -- and we assume it's the same pair who claimed the post and wheel in July 2008 -- have arrived and started both rebuilding the nest and mating.

Last year, I learned that ospreys have two sets of offspring in a year: during the summer in Canada, and during the winter down south. We have no idea where "our" ospreys go each fall -- they could be as close as South Carolina or as far away as South America -- but their summer and winter lives are a mirror of each other. I don't know why that never occurred to me before; I only considered the life they share with us in Nova Scotia, but why wouldn't they hatch out another set of babies in their other home? What else would they be doing but what their instincts tell them to do? It's all about survival -- food and offspring.

We faced a harsh reminder of that constant fight for survival last year.
In late May, we lost one of the ospreys. We last saw him on the cold and rainy morning of the Sunday on the long weekend. He was sitting in the dead spruce tree at the end of our house. A couple of days later, my husband and I asked each other if we were missing an osprey.
We assume it was the male, although it could have been the female, I suppose; they look identical. Either way, the eggs in the nest couldn't be hatched, not without an osprey on them at all times.  The pair rely on each other to keep the adult sitting on eggs fed so with one mate gone (killed but we'll never know how: accident, attacked, deliberately shot?), there was no way for the adult AND the eggs to survive.
We lost an osprey, and the three unhatched babies. That was tough. That was heartbreaking.

So now we wait to see if any pair -- reconfigured or new -- claims the nest this year. The widowed osprey of ours will likely pair up with a new mate but would she/he return to this familiar spot with her/his new mate? Since we've never had "our" birds banded, there is no way to know for sure who is returning. We've only assumed we knew "our" osprey because they never seemed afraid of us; actually, it always seemed as if they interacted with us.

In January, my husband admitted something to me: "When that osprey disappeared, I thought it might mean something was going to happen to me."
He took my breath away with that statement. Had I thought it myself?
That's how entwined our lives have become in the last decade with these ospreys who showed up the year after we married; not only do they give our lives two seasons -- their arrival and their departure, dividing our lives into "ospreys here" and "ospreys not here" -- but we also connect to their living.
Losing an osprey and watching the other one search for it, wait for it, give up on it...broke our hearts.

And apparently, my husband carried a fear deeply in his broken heart, until he had a stroke in August.
We had a happy ending: my mate survived. He is still here, with a second chance on life, and a second chance to hope that he gets to welcome a pair of ospreys home next month.