Audubon Magazine – Summer 2026 – Audubon Magazine

Though menhaden are far less numerous today, their schools are still clearly visible from the skies above— great shimmering packs that run near the surface like a green-blue river through the sea. For both man in his plane and birds on the wing, this visibility takes a lot of the risk out of fishing. A significant difference, however, is what each uses the fish for.

Ospreys rely on menhaden to fuel their species’ survival. Omega grinds them up for pet food, cosmetics, supplements, and feed for livestock and farmed salmon. Which means Atlantic menhaden are now on our menu, too. oanie millward is a perfect example of how Ospreys convert even casual bird observers into passionate advocates. When she was considering buying a one-story home in Colonial Beach, Virginia, which sits along the Potomac, her husband looked out and saw that there was an Osprey nesting on a pole clearly visible from the back door.

“You’re going to like this,” he said, and she did. Watching the birds led to car- ing about them, and that led to eventually starting the Virginia Osprey Foundation, which surveys the town’s Ospreys and throws an annual festival to celebrate their return from Central and South America each spring. “It was such a hopeful story,” Millward told me as we tooled around Colonial Beach in a golf cart, checking in on many of the 50-plus nests within the 2.5 square miles that make up the neighborhood.

The local Ospreys nest mostly atop platforms, but some build in trees and on buoys, and at least one has constructed its residence on top of a boat. Ospreys have provided consistent enter- tainment for the members of this community 35 miles upriver from the Chesapeake, going about their business of fishing, nesting, and raising their young right out in the open.

“It used to be we had so many fledglings that the sky was full of Ospreys,” Millward said. A different story has unfolded over the past two years. To each nest we stop at, she can attach a narra- tive, and the narratives are often dark. The adult birds abandoned one nest and the young died. At another, the adults stayed but the chicks starved. At yet another, lack of food led to siblicide, the firstborn chick killing the second. Ospreys instinctively regulate their clutch sizes according to the amount of food that’s available, often laying three or four when fish are plentiful.

The birds in Colonial Beach that reproduced laid only one or two eggs—and even then the chicks starved.

To Catch a Yellowlegs Lesser Yellowlegs are true world travelers. Beginning in July, the slender shorebirds take off from their breeding grounds in the dense boreal forests of Alaska and Canada and head to marshes and wetlands stretching from the southern United States to Patagonia. These far-flung migrants are at a potential tipping point, having lost more than 60 percent of their population in the past 50 years. Steep declines in the last decade have been driven largely by conversion of their nonbreeding grounds to agricultural land.

Now, Audubon scientists and Colombian researchers are working to turn things around for yellowlegs in critical habitat in Colombia’s Cauca Valley. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAÍR F. COLL TEXT BY MARÍA PAULA RUBIANO A. g Since 2022 the team has searched for Lesser Yellowlegs in flooded rice fields in Jamundí, which offer temporary wetland-like habitat.

Catching them has required plenty of trial and error. “We’ve come up with so many strategies,” says Juan David García Uribe, a biologist at Icesi University in nearby Cali. After many failures—including a night shift that caught only bats and an outing that left the team covered in leeches—the group learned that decoys (opposite) were key to capturing the birds. They outfitted 25 yellowlegs with radio transmitters and in 2025 switched to advanced GPS trackers that provide real-time details on the birds’ movements, revealing their migra- tion routes and habitat preferences.

2 AUDUBON | SUMMER 2026 g Last November, García (this page) and the rest of the team (opposite, top left) arrived at a rice field before daybreak to set up mist nets, hand-painted decoys, and speakers that play recorded calls (opposite, bottom left). Soon after sunrise, they caught the first Lesser Yellowlegs of the day and launched an efficient tagging operation. They weighed and measured the bird, looped a GPS tracker over its back (oppo site, top right), and banded it with color- coded markers and a metal ID tag (opposite, bottom right).

“Since it is so difficult to cap- ture each bird, we gather as much information as possible in the shortest time possible,” says Icesi University biologist Santiago Muñoz Bolaños.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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