A beloved osprey couple appear to have returned to roost in Summit County for a third season since local community members rallied to build them a nesting platform — and this year bird-lovers can get a closer view of the raptors than ever before.

The Friends of the Dillon Ranger District has set up a solar-powered camera on the nesting platform near the Dillon Ranger Station in Silverthorne to livestream the raptors’ activity. Since ospreys typically return to the same nest year after year, the pair is likely the same couple that attempted to build a nest on a crane in an active construction site in 2023.

“We kind of see them as residents of Summit County, just a different species,” Friends of the Dillon Ranger District executive director Alexander “Doozie” Martin said. “We thought other people in the county might find it interesting, seeing their behavior, being able to get on (the livestream) anytime and see what they’re doing.”

Ospreys are large hawks with brown coloring above, white underbellies and a dark stripe through their eyes, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Expert fishermen and fisherwomen, ospreys circle high in the sky searching for fish before diving, talons first, to snatch a fish from the water and carry it back to their nests, which are often built on telephone poles or dead trees near bodies of water.

Sometimes called “fish hawks,” ospreys are migratory birds that breed widely in the Northern Hemisphere and travel south, oftentimes as far as South America, in the winter. Common along the Blue River and near the Dillon Reservoir, ospreys return to Summit County each year in late March or early April.

“They’re faithful to the nest,” said Summit County resident Ruth Carroll, who has volunteered helping to monitor local raptor nests for Colorado Parks and Wildlife for over a decade. “They come back like clockwork.”

Carroll was among those who shared concern for this particular pair of osprey when the raptors were attempting to build their nest on a crane two years ago. One local birder in 2023 said the two hawks were “just frantically flying around and screeching” as the construction workers cleared the crane of sticks each morning as part of safety inspections.

Steve Gilbert, the owner of Tufts Construction and Development Inc., the construction company working with the crane at the time, described the ospreys as “tenacious little birds.” The osprey couple was never able to establish a nest on the crane but kept coming back day after day, delivering more sticks that crews would then clear. Even a fake owl installed on the crane couldn’t scare the birds off — they just stared it down defiantly.

So, Gilbert’s company, Xcel Energy, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the town of Silverthorne, the U.S. Forest Service and local birders collaborated to find the ospreys a better home. Soon, the team pitched a nesting platform outside the Dillon Ranger Station, which was adjacent to the construction site.

“Sure enough, the ospreys went over to that nest and kind of abandoned their effort to build on the crane. That was a relief,” U.S. Forest Service support services specialist Steven Smith, who was involved with the effort, said. “Then last year, it was like ‘OK, well, will the osprey come back?’ And they did.”

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Ever since the ospreys took to the nesting platform, Smith said that there were active talks with the Friends of the Dillon Ranger District, a nonprofit that supports the Forest Service, about installing a camera to observe the birds more closely. When the hawks returned last summer, it became clear that the couple was likely to return annually, so the work to figure out the necessary technology for the livestream got underway in earnest, he said.

Martin said that the Friends of the Dillon Ranger District wanted to make sure that the camera technology didn’t interfere with the osprey in any way. So, before installing the camera, the nonprofit cleared its plans with the U.S. Forest Service, Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

“We really, really wanted to make sure ecologically that we weren’t affecting these birds in any way,” Martin said. “If the camera is to go down at any point we are legally not allowed to go up there and fix it so long as they have made a habitat in that nest.”

Ernie Frey, a Summit County resident who volunteers with the Friends of the Dillon Ranger District, was the mastermind behind getting the technology to work. A retired engineer, Frey said he spent more than 400 hours working on the project, learning the ins and outs of the camera, coding a program to detect when the birds are in the nest and figuring out the logistics of how to keep the battery operating and get the video to stream to YouTube.

Frey said the team installed the camera late last year so that it would already be set up when the ospreys returned. When the first osprey arrived back at the nest April 2, it was ready to go and captured footage of the raptor returning to the nest.

“The whole idea is to make this as autonomous as possible so these guys don’t have to babysit it,” Frey said, referring to the Friends of the Dillon Ranger District team. “So far it’s had no issues — knock on wood!”

One of the biggest design constraints was figuring out how to get the camera to operate without it becoming a lightning risk, Frey said. That’s where solar power comes in. By having the battery running on solar power, rather than running a cord up to the nesting platform, it’s not grounded and therefore doesn’t make the nest any more likely to be struck by lightning, he said.

Another issue Frey had to work around is that if the battery drops too low, it won’t recharge. So the camera is set to automatically turn off if the temperature drops too low or if there is not enough sunlight to recharge it, he said.

Even though the livestream won’t be running 24/7, the Frey said that it is set up to run video clips of previously recorded moments — like an osprey delivering a fish to the nest — whenever it turns off. The camera also has a motion detector that is set up to turn the camera on when there is activity in the nest but that will turn it off if the nest is empty, he said.

The Friends of the Dillon Ranger Districts hopes that the “Raptor Cam,” which can be viewed at fdrd.org/resources/raptor-cam, will prove educational for the community, encouraging residents and visitors to learn more about local wildlife and to develop a sense of stewardship. There could be opportunities for students to get involved in observing the birds or learning about the behind-the-scenes technology.

So far, the camera has captured footage of ravens pilfering sticks from the nest and an owl roosting in it before the osprey returned. There are also video clips of the ospreys’ return, a fish being delivered to the nest, the raptors collecting materials for the nest and the ospreys mating.

Martin said that the hope is that the ospreys will lay eggs so that the public can observe the birds raising their young.

“We would just invite everybody and everybody who is interested in birds or interested in some of our feathered local residents to tune in,” Martin said. “We’re glad to have them back. It’s been a really cool thing to see.”