A new conservation program aims to reintroduce the osprey / fish eagle (Pandion haliaetus) to Switzerland

The osprey (Pandion haliaetus) was hunted to local extinction in Switzerland in 1914, and no breeding osprey have ever been in Switzerland since that time. However, a conservation group known as Nos oiseaux wants to change this by reintroducing the large raptor back into Switzerland.

The osprey is also often known as fish eagle in some areas. It can weight over 2kg, and have a wing span of up to 170cm. As the name suggests it prey on fish, where it mostly catch 150-300g fish in shallow waters. Over 99 % of its diet consists of fish, and observing the osprey as it is catching fish is a really cool experience.

An osprey. Image by Yathin S Krishnappa, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

You can find the osprey in most parts of the world, with the only exception being Antarctica. This makes it one of the most widely distributed raptor species in the world, but as I said above, it is no longer found in Switzerland.

Reintroducing the osprey to Switzerland

Osprey is one of the bird species that is philopatric, which means it will return to the place it was born when it is going to breed. This makes the dispersal of the species very limited, and this is also the reason why the osprey has not naturally returned to Switzerland by itself. This is a problem when the group is wanting to reintroduce the bird, but it is still possible.

In order to reintroduce a philopatric bird the group needs to collect very young birds or even eggs. It is really important that they imprint on this new area and not the one they were from. The young bird will be donated from a variety of European countries, where Norway will donate roughly half of all. In total Switzerland will get 60 young bird, which is enough to establish a decent population there.

Once the young birds are getting into adulthood they will migrate to Africa during the winter, and if the imprint of their new home is successful they will return to Switzerland instead of the donor country when they return from Africa in the spring.

Since the osprey used to be part of Switzerland’s fauna a hundred years ago, there is very little ecological concern to reintroducing the species. Instead of doing damage we can expect it to restore the original ecology in the area where it is released, and will most likely have some effect on the distribution of fish species in the area.

It will be exciting to see if this project is successful, but I don’t really see any great challenges that could disrupt it. The Nos oiseaux plans to create artificial nests in the area close to where they are released, so they don’t even have to worry about building their own when they get back from their vacation in Africa. If everything is going according to plan, Switzerland might have a healthy population of osprey in only 7 years from now!

Thanks for reading & sources

Thanks for reading my post about reintroduction of osprey into Switzerland. I think these types of projects are really important. It would of course be a lot better if we didn’t kill all the ospreys there in the first place, but at least they are trying to make amends by getting a new population back to the country.

I first became aware of this project when reading the Norwegian newspaper NRK who did a story about it. This lead me to the searching for it, and there are many news websites that have written about it. I sadly cannot fact check it completely by myself, because the Nos oiseaux website is only in French (?), but if you know the language, feel free to check it out.

Again, thanks for reading, and make sure to leave a comment below!