Chesapeake Ospreys Starve as Menhaden Vanish From the Bay

The Center for Conservation Biology's 2026 osprey breeding performance survey found the Chesapeake Bay's osprey population in steep decline, with the worst damage in the estuary's saltier stretches. Researchers tied the drop to severe food stress, driven by low availability of Atlantic menhaden during nesting season. The 2026 season was 'the worst productivity year ever recorded for ospreys in the Chesapeake Bay,' the study said, with roughly 0.26 chicks per pair — well under the 0.8 minimum needed to break even.

The warning signs came from a citizen scientist. Roberta Kellam, a retired lawyer and longtime birder, has monitored about two dozen nests on Nassawadox Creek on Virginia's Eastern Shore for 20 years and logs her counts on Osprey Watch, the center's project. Around eight years ago, chicks stopped making it. 'Once they hatched, they were disappearing,' she said, recalling creeks that fell silent by mid-to-late May. The first comprehensive survey of her local colony began in 2024, which she called 'very grim' — the first time she could look inside nests and see dead chicks and abandoned eggs.

Bryan Watts, who has studied Chesapeake ospreys for about 40 years, said the failures show up as hunger. He estimated an 80 percent drop in menhaden deliveries and a 50 percent decline in food quality compared with the 1980s, with chicks starving at older ages than researchers historically saw. More than 30 percent of females in some study areas laid no eggs at all, against about 2 percent in the 1980s. On the lower Patuxent River, where ospreys lean hardest on menhaden, pairs are raising too few young to replace dying adults; upriver birds with a more varied diet are faring better. 'They need [menhaden] in mid-May to about mid-June. That's a critical period, and they're not available,' Watts said.

Why fewer menhaden reach the birds is murkier than what's happening in the nests. Watts points to climate change shifting the fish's distribution and arrival times, and says researchers lack fisheries monitoring data — industry-held commercial data isn't public, leaving gaps on availability and older age classes of ospreys. The American Small Pelagics Network, which represents menhaden fishermen and processors, pushed back, saying 'a struggling predator does not by itself prove a menhaden harvest problem' and citing the 2025 Atlantic menhaden assessment, which found the stock is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.

The fishery is enormous. An estimated 410 million pounds of Atlantic menhaden was caught coastwide in 2024 — the largest commercial catch by volume on the East Coast and second nationally only to Alaskan pollock. About 20 percent becomes bait for lobster and blue crab fleets; the other 80 percent is reduced into fertilizer, livestock feed and dietary supplements, per New Jersey Fish and Wildlife, with aquaculture demand for fishmeal feeding a $313 billion global industry. Ocean Harvesters and Omega Protein dominate the reduction side; Omega Protein, owned by Canadian aquaculture giant Cooke Seafood, processes roughly 70 percent of the coast's catch from plants in Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. An Ocean Harvesters spokesperson told Inside Climate News that 'poor osprey breeding in parts of the Chesapeake Bay does not establish that commercial menhaden fishing caused the food stress or that further restricting the fishery would solve it,' adding that USGS scientists have identified a range of factors affecting osprey reproduction.