Ospreys nesting on stadium light pole disrupts Minnesota high school’s fall sports season

APPLE VALLEY, Minn. (AP) — The opening of the fall sports season at a Minnesota high school has been disrupted by a pair of ospreys that thought a light pole on the football field would be a perfect place to build a huge nest and raise their chicks.

As migratory birds, the raptors are protected under state and federal law. So officials at Apple Valley High School had to rearrange their football and soccer schedules, switching to day games instead of nights. Turning on the hot floodlights would have risked cooking the birds and starting a fire.

The school’s teams, which just happen to be named the Eagles, have been working on a fix with the state Department of Natural Resources. The school has been sending up a drone twice a week to monitor the chicks so that once the young ospreys are old enough and fly off, crews can remove the nest and switch on the traditional Friday Night Lights.

“Luckily for Apple Valley, they should be able to remove the nest within probably a week because the birds have already taken some of their first flights,” Heidi Cyr, the DNR’s nongame wildlife permit coordinator, said in an interview Friday.

Cory Hanson, the athletic director at the school in the Minneapolis suburbs, said he’s seen as many as four chicks in the drone photos. He said they became aware of the nest around June.

“When you see these large birds flying across your field with these humongous sticks, you start to ask questions like, ‘What is going on here?’” he said. “And you take one look at that nest, right? And you’re like, ‘OK, this is not your average bird.’”

DNR officials confirmed it was an osprey nest, and told school officials that federal law made it clear that they could not disturb it for now.

So, Hanson said, they had no choice but to revise their schedules. But he said other schools have been great about finding alternate sites and times, despite their initial disbelief.

“When you tell someone this story of ‘Wow, we have to reschedule because there’s an osprey nest in our stadium,’ they’re like, ‘You can’t make this type of stuff up, right?’” he said.

According to the DNR, ospreys are one of the larger birds of prey that inhabit Minnesota, with wingspans of 4.5 to 6 feet (1.4 to 1.8 meters).

They’ll return to their nests every year and will build them up with new materials every season. Their nests can get as large as 10 feet deep (3 meters) and 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) in diameter. Their diet is almost exclusively live fish. They’ll dive from high altitudes to grab fish with their sharp talons, plunging as deep as 3 feet (1 meter) underwater.

Ospreys like to build their nests in high places with clear views, including dead old trees and structures that resemble them, like utility poles, channel markers and cellphone towers. That sometimes creates fire hazards. So the DNR issues a number of nest removal permits every year. But permission to remove nests that still hold young ospreys is normally denied unless there’s a major health and human safety concern. Stadium lighting doesn’t qualify, Cyr said.

Efforts to restore their population, which have included building nest platforms, have been a success in Minnesota and elsewhere. Cyr noted. They came off the state’s special concern list in 2015. Depending on the time of year, they can now be found across most of North America.

Once the chicks at Apple Valley fly off for good, Hanson said, school officials and the DNR will relocate the nest from the light tower to a new platform on school grounds in hopes that the parents will return next year. But just to be safe, they’ll also erect deterrents on the lights so the ospreys don’t try to nest there again.

“So if anyone sees that happening, don’t worry,” Cyr said. “The birds are safe. They’ve successfully left the nest and they’re on their way to becoming adults themselves.”

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Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski reported from Minneapolis.