OSPREY

21st January 2024

Photo Credit: Harry Collins (Getty Images), CANVA

QUOTATION

All places yield to him ere he sits down,

And the nobility of Rome are his;

The Senators and Patricians love him too.

The Tribunes are no soldiers, and their people

Will be as rash in the repeal as hasty

To expel him thence. I think he will be to Rome

As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it

By sovereignty of nature.

AUFIDIUS, Coriolanus, Act 4, Scene 7

OSPREY (Pandion haliaetus)

The reference above, comparing Coriolanus with the fish catching bird of prey, is the only reference to the Osprey. Osprey appear in the Geneva Bible in the Old Testament lists of unclean foods in Leviticus (11:13) and Deuteronomy (14:12). William Turner writing in 1544 tells us that ‘the Osprey is a bird much better known to-day to Englishment than many who keep fish in stews would wish; for within a short time it bears off every fish. Our anglers smear or mix their bait with Osprey’s fat arguing that thus the bait will prove more efficacious’. John Caius (1570) writes that ‘this bird is a great preyer upon fishes, the water being cleft by the shock of its body as it plunges, and on them it lives’.

The Osprey is now a summer visitor only to Scotland and Northern England, returning from Africa in February or March. There were no breeding Ospreys in Britain by the early 1900s but a single pair returned to Scotland in the 1950s and the Osprey has been successfully reintroduced to parts of Britain.

More Information

Birdlife Datazone: Osprey

British Trust for Ornithology (BTO): Osprey

Folger Shakespeare Library: Search Shakespeare’s Works

RSPB: Osprey

William Turner (1544) A short and succinct history of the principal birds noticed by Pliny and Aristotle, & John Caius (1570) De rariorum animalium atque stirpium historia. (Translated from the Latin by Evans. A. H. 1903, accessed via Archive.org)