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Photo: Joshua Sudock, Orange County Register
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Last season, the UC Irvine baseball team had an issue that most athletic programs don't encounter.
Birds of prey, or more precisely, a tandem of osprey, took up residence - perhaps drawn by their love of Anteater baseball - in a light tower behind home plate. They occasionally dropped fish they had hunted and pooped on the fans. But mostly, the ospreys just watched. They had built a nest that put them in jeopardy of being fried by the stadium lights.
And now, thanks to a sharp ecology and evolutionary biology professor and some luck, the ospreys no longer have the highest seats in the ballpark.
This January, maintenance workers removed the vacant nest from the light tower. And Bowler got a phone call asking about relocating the nest.
Bowler and his class used some wire screen, wooden braces, branches from tamarisk and black willow trees. They built a circular nest about 3-feet in diameter. They put it atop a 30-foot-tall platform in the marsh. The man-made nest was placed about a quarter-mile from the baseball field.
And they waited.
In the first week of February, the ospreys returned. They took up camp in the student-made nest.
OC Register, 3.17.16 |