UnitEndangeredanimals.doc

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Meet the Author=David A. Hill
I was born in Wlasall, a town in the area of the English Midlands known as The Black Country. I lived on the edge of the town, and I just had to cross the road to get into an enormous park, which extended right out into the open countryside. I spent most of my free time in the park and the fields and that started my love of the natural world. Then when i was 15, my parents took me on a camping holiday to Scotland, and that was the first time that I saw the ospreys that this story is about-we visited them at the famous Loch Garten site. And a year later I joined the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds(RSPB), the birdwatching club that both of the boys in the story belong to.
When I was eighteen I went to college and made close friends with a student who went on to become a professional birdwatcher. We spent a lot of time watching birds and later he taught me how to catch them safely in nets and put rings on their legs in order to follow their movements.
After college I worked as a teacher and I also started writing poetry and short stories.
I have lived in Italy, Kosovo and Serbia and am currently living in Hungary and travel extensively throughout the world as part of my job as a freelance writer, teacher and teacher trainer.
And of course wherever I go I always see something or meet someone who is an inspiration for a story or a character or an unexpected twist in my latest piece of writing.
I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it and will be inspired to get out and look at what is happening in the countryside near you.

About the book Operation Osprey

The whole passage’s word clouds
About Operation Osprey
The story of the return of the osprey to nest in Britain is amazing. Ospreys were hunted to extinction by 1910. After this they were only seen as they migrated to and from their nesting sites in Scandinavia and Russia. Then in 1954 a pair returned to Loch Garten in Scotland.
The RSPB set up a guard on the island under the trees where the birds had nested. Over the next few years they reared a number of chicks, but some of the eggs were stolen. Eventually Loch Garten became a Bird Reserve where the public could watch the birds and their chicks. Gradually, the young birds also returned and built nests on other lakes in Scotland and now there are over 100 pairs nesting each year.
Birdwatchers have been waiting for the first pair to breed further south in England, by 2006 this still had not happened.
The osprey(Latin name: Pandion haliaetus) is a magnificent bird to look at.
Its body is 50-60 cm long, and its wingspan is 150-170cm.
One thing that makes it so interesting for birdwatchers is that, unlike most other birds of prey, the osprey eats fish. It catches them by flying high above the lake and then diving , holding out its claws to catch the fish just before it hits the surface. It then holds the fish in its claws and flies out of the water to eat the fish on the branch of a tree, or at its nest.
The nest is a huge pile of sticks at the top of a tree. It is up to 1.5 metres in width, the birds return to the same nest year after year.
Ospreys migrate from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa to spend each winter, and return the following April to nest.

Operation Osprey
By David A. Hill
1 A text invitation

I was coming home from school on the bus on Tuesday, when I got a text message from mike. It was very short:Mkt X7. UGNT. I knew that this meant he wanted to meet me at the Market Cross at seven O'clock that evening and that it was something urgent. It was also a bit unusual. We'd arranged to meet after school on Friday to plan our weekend's birdwatching as usual, so this must be something special. I felt excited.
Let me give you some background. My name's Don Ball. I'm fifteen and I go to Blue way Comprehensive School. Mike(or Mike Peters, to give him his full name) is the same age and goes to the local grammar school, but we've been friends since junior school. We both live in the village of Saltley, which is in the Midlands. We've been birdwatching together since we were 11. I suppose we're quite good at it now, because we do it regularly, read about it, use the Net to find out about birds, and we're members of a club for birdwatchers, too.
Question: What’s the relationship between Mike and Don?
When I got home, I got some biscuits and orange juice and went up to my room to get on with my homework so that I could go out and meet Mike later. It took me longer than usual to do it because my mind kept wandering, thinking of what Mike wanted to tell me. He must have seen an unusual bird.(Of course, I thought his text message must be because of a bird)
It was early April and birds which had gone south to warmer countries for the winter were coming back to Britain for the summer now. We were looking forward to 'meeting old friends'...but there was always the chance of something rare and unusual arriving, too.
2 Hearing the news

Question: What’s the news?

At 6.45 I left the house and walked down the road to the centre of the village. Saltley is a small place. There's an old church, two pubs, a post office, a grocer's and a couple of other general shops.
It's home to about 1000 people---half of them work on the nearby farms and the other half commute(=travel to work every day)to the nearest big city to work. And right in the middle of the small square in the centre of Saltley stands the Market Cross, which is a well-know meeting -place for everyone from the area.
I said hello to several people I knew as I walked over to sit on the steps at the base of the stone cross.
Soon I heard Mike's familiar lapwing whistle, and saw him standing on the other side of the road, I walked over.
"Hi, Mike. What's this about?" I asked at once.
"Just wait a moment until we're away from the crowd and I'll tell you," he answered mysteriously.
We walked over to the church yard and sat on one of the benches.
"So?" I asked again.
"Oooh you're so impatient!" he joked, but I could teel that he was excited, too.
I waited. He began.
"I took the day off school today," he said. "After this week of good weather followed by last night's storm, I thought there might be some good birds about."
"And were there?" I asked.
"Well, there are some nice new arrivals---a few swallows, a chiffchaff calling," he answered."But then I went to RP."
RP was the name we gave to a set of three small lakes surrounded by woods. They were labelled Redman's Pools on large-scale maps, but lots of people didn't know they were there because there were hidden by trees.
I waited again. A smile played over Mike's face.
"Osprey,"he said very quietly.
"What!?" I shouted.
"Osprey,"he said again, simply, I sat staring at him with my mouth open.
I should explain. An osprey is a big hunting bird, which catches fish. It's really spectacular when it dives into the water feet first and catches a big fish and flies off with it. There weren't any in Britain because they'd been hunted too much, but then in 1954 a pair nested in Loch Garten in Scotland. They were protected by the RSPB, because lots of people wanted the eggs for their collections. But now they've spread to nest at lots of lakes around Scotland. People hope that they will soon start nesting all over England, too.
We'd never seen an osprey at RP before, and I'd never seen one at all. Mike had seen one when he'd been on a birdwatching trip to Scotland last summer. I was jealous.
"I watched it for more than an hour. It flew in from the trees on Castle Hill. I knew something was coming because all the ducks flew away," he said. "And then it circled over Big Pool twice, and sat in the pine trees on the island in the middle. It flew away to the west."
We were silent-he was thinking about what he'd seen and I was thinking what I had missed while I'd been sitting in my maths class.
After a time, Mike said:"So, shall we go to RP tomorrow morning?"
"But I've got school", I said.
"So have I," he said."Just like today."
"But do you think it'll be there?" I asked.
"Birdwatcher!" he said. By which he meant that if I was a birdwatcher, I should know that nobody could say what a bird would or wouldn't do at a particular time, especially when they were migrating.
"So, are you coming?"
"Oh...oh...alright," I said, knowing my parents would be very angry if they found out. They already thought I spent too much time birdwatching and not enough time studying.

3 Time off school

I was afraid to take the whole day off school, so I went in the morning. Once I was in school I pretended to be ill and was sent home. As I took the bus back to the village. I felt very excited, and a little nervous. I got off at the stop near the entrance to the hidden track (=path) that leads down to the pools. I took my binoculars out of my school bag and hung them around my neck ready to use.
I met Mike, as planned, near the disused (=not in use) buildings of Redman's Farm, and we sat on a gate which let us look over Big Pool.
"Have you seen anything yet?" I asked, and he read me the list from his notebook-a mixture of water birds and other small birds. But osprey was not amongst them. We scanned the pool, calling out the names of the species of duck and other birds we could see.
"Let's walk around the other two pools," I suggested. I hid my heavy school bag behind a large stone and we set off round the northern side of Big Poop, and then through the trees to the smaller Marsh Pool. There we added some more species to our list, including some grey herons(=bird with a long neck). After watching there for about half an hour, we wandered back past the third lake-Wood Pool. I was just about to say that it must have gone, when I heard a whistle from Mike.
"Look! Left island three on Big Pool," he said in a loud whisper. I looked and there it was---my first osprey.
"WOW!" I shouted, as I examined the white chest, dark brown back and white head with it's brown eye-stripe and yellow eye.
"Keep quiet, you idiot," said Mike quietly and angrily,"Or you'll frighten it off."
Just then the bird took off from the branch where it had been sitting, circled the pool and called loudly 'pyep'. We watched, and to our amazement it was joined by another osprey which must have been sitting somewhere else.
"Two ospreys!" Mike exclaimed. The birds circled the lake, calling 'pyep' a few times, and the settled on the pine trees on the island again.
"This is amazing," I said."You know, they might be looking for somewhere to build a nest."
We both knew it was too much to hope for, so we said nothing. And we left them there and went home on the bus, hoping our parents wouldn't find out what we'd been doing.

Questions:
1. Why was Don so excited when he saw the osprey?

2. Can you think of a time when you were very excited about something? What was it?

3. Why did the boys know that the ospreys’ nesting at Redman’s Pools was ‘too much to hope for?

4 The holidays

Of course, we spent the whole of the following weekend watching the ospreys as they flew around gracefully and fished spectacularly in the pools, and we were very glad a week later when the Easter holidays started.
We spent every day there, cycling out while it was still dark, making notes, doing drawings, taking photographs, recording the birds' activities, and soon we realized that they were starting to make a nest.
We decided that it would be better to keep the whole thing a secret because we knew there were lots of egg collectors who would like to have an osprey's egg in their collection, even though it was illegal. So we said nothing to the few people we met there-the occasional(=not frequent) fisherman or walker. They never noticed the ospreys and they probably wouldn't recognize them.
In the end we told my parents. Mike and I were having supper with them one evening when we'd got back from a day watching our ospreys, and they asked lots of questions about what we were doing.
"Shall we tell them, Mike?" I asked, looking from him to my mother and father.
"Well, we'll need them to promise not to tell anyone," he answered, only half joking.
So we told them all about it, showed them our notes, drawings, maps and photographs. They were very impressed and very complimentary(=when you say nice things about someone else) about our hard work.

Questions:
1. Do you think it was a good idea for the boys to decide to keep the ospreys a secret?

2. Why did they tell Don’s parents? Was that a good idea?

3. Would you have kept it a secret or told someone else?

5 Mr Roberts

The holidays ended and we went back to school. By now the ospreys had finished building their nest at the top of one of the pine trees on the island in the middle of Big Pool. Of course we still went to watch them every weekend, and a couple of nights after school, now that the days were getting longer.
One Saturday we were surprised to find a white van parked on the roadside near the track (=path), and we wheeled our bikes down the track to Redman's Farm we saw a middle-aged man standing looking at us. As we approached he said:"Aha, and here come our tow bird experts!"
Mike and I exchange glances that were both puzzled and worried. When we had chained our bikes to the fence, the man said:"Don and Mike, I presume(=guess). Though I have no idea which is which." And he laughed. We stood silently as he looked from one to the other of us, expecting us to say something.
"Well, whichever of you is Don...," here I nodded my head, "...I have your father to thank for telling me about your marvelous find (=thing you found)."
My face burned red, and my heart sank. Mike glared at me angrily. Why had my stupid father gone and told somebody. The man looked at us, and seemed rather concerned at the reaction he had caused.
"I'm sure you're very busy with your studies," he said. "So please don't worry about me. I'll just wander around and see what I can see. Oh, and it's Mr Roberts, by the way. Pleased to meet you." and then he turned and started to walk around the lakes.
As soon as he was 100 metres away, Mike turned on:"Did you know about this? Why did your father tell him? Who is he? What does he want?"
"I don't know, Mike," I answered, angrily." I don't know any more than you do."
The rest of the day was very tense. Mr Roberts appeared from time to time on different sides of the pool. He had binoculars and a camera, and he was watching the ospreys and taking photographs. At about midday he came over to where Mike and I were sitting watching the birds.
"I'm off now," he said. "Thank you very much for your help. And give my best wishes to your father, Don."
"What help?" asked Mike after he'd gone. "We didn't give him any help. I really don't like that man."
"Neither do I,