We Can Blame the Weather

On this day, July 31, 2011: An osprey chick takes short flights from the nest. 

Yesterday afternoon, the one osprey parent showed up at the nest and the surviving baby sat up. So as of 4:30 Tuesday, it was alive. The only thing is the parent didn't bring in a fish. She sat on the side of the nest and called.
"She's calling her mate to bring in a fish," Dwayne said.
She eventually flew off, the baby sat up for a while, then it disappeared.
I thought, This is crap. We know it's alive. We know it didn't eat yesterday. Why don't we try to save it?

"If the baby is still in the nest and there is a parent present, by law we can't interfere with the nest," a staff member at Cobequid Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in Brookfield, NS, told me. "If the baby is on the ground, then we could get involved. I know it's hard but sometimes you have to let nature take its course.
"Getting hit by a car or shot by an arrow is not nature," she added as any true and committed wildlife rehabilitator would.

She said sometimes a parent will push a baby out of the nest so we can hope this happens with this one, although prior to this crisis, the oldest and biggest baby hadn't been displaying the usual ready-to-fledge behaviour in the nest: flapping its wings, jumping from side to side to side, jumping up and down.
It was not yet ready to fly.
"We've often had the babies flying by the end of July," I told her. "This year, they weren't doing any of their wing flapping and hopping yet."

Summer 2016 - wing stretching.

"They were late because of the cold, wet spring," she answered. "There have been a lot of osprey nest fails in Ontario this year for the same reason."
They know this from the nests monitored by camera. There are no reasons, apparently, for growing chicks to suddenly die.

I couldn't find any news of this when I Googled but I did find an Associated Press article out of the States from mid-June that stated, "Any bird was in peril of nesting this year." A cold, rainy spring means wet nests, making it harder for birds to incubate their eggs.

The article is about the Midwest and looks at a monitored nest of peregrine falcons but perhaps what researchers found with this year's hatchlings could explain what happened in our nest. Joe DeBold, quoted, leads Missouri's peregine falcon conservation program, and they gathered up a nest of chicks for tagging.
"It was clear that something was wrong with the remaining chicks. They sat quietly on the table, their beaks and eyes swollen... DeBold said they appeared to be suffering from an infection, perhaps from having eaten rancid meat. Without the fully developed immune system of an adult bird, there's little they could do to fight it. And it would be folly for a human to try to rehabilitate them because only the chicks' parents can teach them to hunt for prey from the air, a skill they would need in order to survive as adults."
[article posted online by Associated Press, June 14, 2019, written by Emily Younker]

So there you have it. A possible reason for this crisis, and also a reason to not save the remaining baby. How do we teach it to fish when we are not ospreys?
In the end, we still have no babies launching into the world this summer. The second season no babies from the "Riverview nest" have made it into the world. Having seen them as chicks and celebrated them, I'm devastated, and feel like I am in mourning but it helps to have some answers, even if it's just theories and possibilities.

Summer 2016 - the first fledging takes flight while a sibling and a parent watch.