Ospreys Nest On Flanders, L.I. Home, Leave Family Fit To Be Tied
FLANDERS, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- A Long Island homeowner is having an epic battle with a family of birds who have moved in and are making life difficult.
As CBS2's Elise Finch reported, all kinds of birds have bene drawn to Dhonna and Bobby Gooddale's home for the past eight years. And yards away from Flanders Bay, it is a particularly attractive location for osprey.
The fish-eating predators, also known as sea hawks, have built a massive nest atop the couple's chimney.
"It hasn't been too bad except for the last year or so," Bobby Gooddale said. "It's kind of grown, and now it's like an estate they have up there."
"It's a condominium," said Dhonna Gooddale. "You have tiny birds inside the nest under the birds."
What started out as a small nest inside their chimney has grown into an enormous living space out in the open, with two adult osprey and at least two babies.
The problem is that the adults are getting aggressive with their human landlords.
"So now that they're more exposed, they feel very threatened and they're very territorial," Dhonna Gooddale said. "You get branches thrown at you. They'll throw anything that they can to make you go away."
Meanwhile, for the past year, an entire section of their porch has been off limits. It's littered with sticks, fish carcasses and bird poop.
"They poop everywhere! They actually almost pooped on your cameraman a second ago," said the couple's son, Jesse Gooddale. "That's why it's best to leave this area to them until they leave because you can't even enjoy this area."
"So what I'm looking to do is lovingly evict them," said Dhonna Gooddale.
The Gooddales do not want to harm the ospreys, so even though they want to evict them, they are going to wait for them to leave on their own. That should happen in the next two to eight weeks, when the babies are old enough to fly with their parents.
Then, the Gooddales will do four things – remove the next, clean up the mess the birds left behind, and make their chimney less attractive to the birds next year by installing some type of metal housing.
They also plan to build a platform away from the house to encourage the ospreys and other birds to build their nests there.
Ospreys will swoop down on people who are too close to their nests, but they rarely attack humans. A veterinarian told CBS2 all the homeowners can really do right now is cover their porch with a tarp, keep their distance, and wait for the birds to leave.
