Category: Wires

Bryan Watts has spent more than three decades watching ospreys reclaim the Chesapeake Bay, returning each spring from South America to crowd its tidal rivers and creeks, shorelines, channel markers, and nesting platforms. The William & Mary biologist followed their recovery from the DDT era as the bay became home to the world’s largest breeding population of ospreys.

Now one of America’s great wildlife recoveries is coming undone. Across the Chesapeake this year, Watts and his colleagues at William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology recorded the worst osprey breeding season they have ever documented. Researchers working these waters have found chicks emaciated and starving in their nests.

A starving osprey chick can seem almost weightless — its breastbone sharp beneath feathers, its body too small for the nest around it. Three summers ago, Watts spent 3½ hours checking 81 nests on Mobjack Bay: empty nest after empty nest, with just three chicks at the end. Seeing a dead chick still gets to him, but what really stops him is absence. Watts drove home, he said, “with a sick feeling that something is clearly not right.”

The warning sign is no longer confined to the Chesapeake. Last week, Watts and his colleagues released the first picture of the 2026 breeding season up and down the East Coast: 2,886 osprey pairs in 65 study areas across 10 Atlantic states. Only 28% of saltwater study areas produced enough young to maintain their populations, compared with 93% of freshwater areas. The deficits extend from the Chesapeake through Delaware and New Jersey to Long Island and southern New England.

At the center of that widening crisis is a fish most Americans would hardly recognize. Atlantic menhaden are silver, oily, and generally less than a foot long. Rich in fat and calories, they are the principal prey of Chesapeake ospreys and the nucleus of a food web extending far beyond the bay, including the fish humans do eat. Striped bass, bluefish, whales, and seabirds feed on them; Maine lobstermen put them in traps.

A fight over menhaden has brought together an unlikely — and increasingly vocal — coalition. Recreational anglers want menhaden in the water for the striped bass and other game fish that eat them. Charter captains need those predators to make a living. Lobstermen need menhaden for bait. Conservation groups want enough left for ospreys and other wildlife.

What remains uncertain is why menhaden aren’t there when birds and fishermen need them. Scientists are looking at several possible explanations, including commercial harvest and changing water conditions. Timing may matter, too: Osprey food demand has typically peaked from mid-May through mid-July, while in some recent years large numbers of menhaden haven’t arrived until weeks later.

But a growing number of critics have begun to focus on Omega Protein, which runs the Atlantic Coast’s last remaining menhaden reduction plant, located in Reedville, Va. The state receives about three-quarters of the entire Atlantic Coast menhaden quota, and roughly 90% of its share goes to the reduction fishery supplying Omega.

At the Reedville plant, menhaden are processed on an industrial scale into fishmeal, fish oil, and other products. Its exclusive supplier, Ocean Harvesters, caught nearly 300 million pounds of Atlantic menhaden for the plant in 2024. That scale alone has made the fleet impossible to ignore in the debate over how many menhaden are being left for everything else that eats them.

Steve Atkinson, chairperson of the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Association, argues there are no longer enough menhaden in the bay to support both industrial reduction fishing at its current level and a healthy ecosystem. Members of his group are seeing fewer schools of menhaden and catching fewer game fish, which is why they support cutting the bay harvest cap in half in the meantime. “We need action now, not five years from now,” he said.

Omega and Ocean Harvesters reject that conclusion, saying scientists have not established that their harvest causes local shortages or osprey failures. That dispute — over a fish neither side fully controls, eaten by a bird neither side can feed — is at the heart of the fight.

Ben Landry, vice president of public affairs for Ocean Fleet Services, the parent company of Ocean Harvesters, said in a statement that blaming osprey starvation on the menhaden fishery is “an oversimplified explanation for a complex ecological issue.” Water conditions, other prey, predators, and habitat change all contributed to the birds’ decline, he added.

Watts himself describes the evidence as a strong association, not proof that commercial harvest caused the nesting failures.

Regardless of the exact cause, scientists have documented major shifts within the Chesapeake. In saltier waters, where ospreys depend most heavily on menhaden, 81% of nesting pairs failed to raise a single chick in 2026. Across those waters, four nesting pairs produced, on average, just one chick among them — far short of the rate needed to sustain the population. In fresher reaches, where ospreys can turn to catfish and gizzard shad, pairs produced enough young to sustain their numbers.

The food reaching the nests has changed, too. At some Chesapeake nests, Watts found, ospreys are bringing home menhaden more than 80% less often today than they did in the 1980s.

Anglers coastwide are seeing their own version of that shift. For 26 years, Chris Newsome made his living guiding fishermen on the Chesapeake from Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. A biologist by training, Newsome knows there will always be pockets of fish somewhere. What has disappeared, he said, is the ability to count on finding them. The good fishing comes in stretches that are “shorter and shorter and shorter.” For a charter captain, he said, what’s needed is “predictability.” This year, after what he called “the worst fishing in my lifetime,” Newsome closed his business and put his boats up for sale.

Fishermen up and down the Atlantic Coast describe the same increasingly uneven pattern: One community can be surrounded by menhaden, also called pogies or bunker, but more fishermen cite long stretches between sightings where they once reliably found them.

Off Virginia, spotter pilots search from the air for the dark stain of a menhaden school. Seine boats encircle the fish with massive purse-seine nets, close the bottom like a drawstring and pump the catch aboard larger vessels, including Ocean Harvesters’ new $9 million, 165-foot Tangier Sound. The fleet can also follow migrating menhaden north into federal waters, sometimes as far as New Jersey.

Reedville is the survivor of a once-sprawling industry. At its peak, more than 20 processing factories operated from Maine to Florida. As stocks contracted and states imposed restrictions, the plants disappeared; by 2006, Reedville was the only one left.

The corporate arrangement behind that fleet is unusual. Cooke, the Canadian seafood conglomerate that bought Omega for nearly $500 million in 2017, is constrained by a federal law that allows a fishing vessel to be owned by a company only if U.S. citizens own and control at least 75% of the company. Ocean Harvesters is 80% owned by Seth Dunlop, a U.S. citizen, Cooke employee, and nephew of Cooke CEO Glenn Cooke; Omega owns 20%.

Most of the catch is reduced into fishmeal, fish oil, and concentrated products rather than sold as food for people. Before Cooke took Omega private, federal filings identified Nestlé Purina PetCare as one of Omega’s biggest customers. Some Blue Buffalo and Purina pet foods list menhaden fish meal or oil among their ingredients, though the labels do not identify suppliers. Landry said in an email that most of Omega’s fishmeal and oil is sold domestically, including into pet food markets.

Most of Omega’s sales are domestic, with about 17% going overseas last year, according to Landry. Omega markets a concentrated menhaden product as an “attractant” for aquaculture feed pellets, and trade records reviewed for this story show its products shipped to Honduras, Indonesia, and Vietnam. That rankles fishermen who see menhaden becoming harder to count on at home.

A menhaden left swimming is hard to value. But some of that hidden worth can be measured. A June 2026 study commissioned by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, an advocacy group, estimated that East Coast anglers spent $804 million in 2025 on trips using menhaden as bait, chum, or scent. The estimate combines a survey of 1,316 anglers with federal fishing and spending data. For comparison, Omega says its combined Atlantic and Gulf operations generate about $300 million in annual sales, and Omega and Ocean Harvesters say their Virginia operations directly employ about 260 people.

Balancing those demands falls largely to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a 15-state body that manages menhaden along the coast. It classifies Atlantic menhaden as “not overfished” and says overfishing — fishing above the established threshold — is not occurring. But that is a coastwide finding. ASMFC says its assessment cannot tell whether menhaden are abundant enough in a smaller area such as the Chesapeake Bay.

Last year, the commission lowered its estimate of the menhaden population after revising a key estimate in its assessment: how many menhaden die of natural causes each year. ASMFC stressed that the change reflected a better understanding of the fish, not a decline in their numbers.

Jerald Ault and Jiangang Luo, University of Miami scientists whose reanalysis prompted that revision, now say even the revised estimate may be too high. “If natural mortality is set too high,” Ault said in a university statement, “the population can appear able to support more fishing than its biology allows.” ASMFC reviewed an earlier version of their analysis but not the final peer-reviewed paper.

The lack of definitive science has become an argument against tighter limits. Yet Virginia lawmakers have spent years failing to fund the research that could provide it.

In 2023, the General Assembly ordered the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to draw up a research plan for menhaden. Scientists, conservationists, anglers, and industry representatives agreed on nine research priorities, including abundance and localized depletion.

But in each legislative session since, bills to fund that research repeatedly stalled. In 2026 alone, three different proposals failed to advance during the session: one to fund research aimed at understanding menhaden abundance in the bay, another to temporarily halt industrial fishing there, and a third to limit when and how the fleet could fish.

Omega says it never opposed the research. But a letter its lobbyist sent to Virginia lawmakers last year proposed replacing the full study with a two-year pilot or deferring it until 2026. Landry said that officials at the company believed full funding was no longer available by then and that the study as written was not scientifically sound research.

“The industry is now using that delay in definitive science as an excuse to stall new limits,” Chris Moore, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia executive director, said in an email. “The alarm bells in the bay keep getting worse. It’s mind-boggling.”

Landry, however, said the industry has helped fund preliminary research, given Virginia Institute of Marine Science researchers access to its vessels and “supported the research appropriation included in Virginia’s current budget.”

After the legislation failed again this year, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger kept the research alive through the state budget, and Virginia provided $2 million over two years for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to begin the work. Meanwhile, the commission is now considering changes to the Chesapeake reduction cap ranging from no cut to a 50% reduction.

Omega and Ocean Harvesters oppose a 50% cut to the bay harvest, and Landry noted that regulators classify menhaden as “not overfished,” adding that tighter Chesapeake limits aren’t justified “without a demonstrated biological need.”

The fight extends to Louisiana, where Omega operates alongside Daybrook Fisheries, another menhaden-processing company. After three net failures spilled an estimated 850,000 fish in 2023, lawmakers strengthened tracking, enforcement, and reporting. But a 2026 bill to move the fleet farther offshore and reduce other species caught with menhaden failed.

Back on the Chesapeake, the numbers keep getting worse. In the saltier reaches where ospreys depend most on menhaden, the birds’ reproduction has fallen for three straight years. If that continues, Watts projects the bay’s osprey population could fall by roughly half within a decade.

By September, the Chesapeake begins to empty of ospreys. The adults leave first; the young follow later, migrating alone, sometimes thousands of miles south. Those that survive will return next spring to the same rivers, the same navigation markers, sometimes the same nests.

For generations, that journey has ended with the same promise. They came home to the Chesapeake, circled above the water and hunted.

There were fish here.

They climb through bedroom windows and open car doors. They sneak into restaurants, fire stations, and vacation rentals. Across the country, black bears are foraging for food.

Human-bear encounters are on the rise this year in at least 15 states. Across the West, Northeast, and Southeast, agencies received more bear-related calls than last year. In Colorado, reports have increased by as much as 200%, and in Utah, bears in cities have reached a record high.

Some calls report a sighting. Others involve bears breaking into homes, cars, or chicken coops. Very rarely, the calls report attacks.

There are about 450,000 black bears in the United States. Most avoid people, only getting close when they are in search of food. But when these opportunistic omnivores succeed in eating human food, they will continue doing so and, experts say, it is impossible to reverse the behavior.

As more people move into bear country, humans must adapt.

While Keryn Francisco and her son were fishing, a black bear broke through an open window to raid the fridge in their cabin in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. The bear had expensive taste, eating avocados, brioche buns, croissants, chocolate strawberries, and tri-tip steaks.

It returned for seconds and then thirds, bringing the food to the porch to eat and leaving a mess behind. “He was living his best life,” Francisco said.

In California and across much of the West, human-bear encounters are increasing. Experts say environmental conditions are driving much of this year’s uptick by wiping out the black bear’s natural food supply.

Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have cited drought as a factor in the increase. Officials in North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee said the same.

Arjun Dheer, California’s statewide black bear coordinator, said parts of the West had unusually low snowpack and warm, dry conditions that were followed by drought, early snowmelt, and damaging late-spring freezes.

“Those conditions can reduce or disrupt natural foods like grasses, berries, fruits, acorns, and other mast, causing bears to range farther and take greater risks around developed areas in search of calories,” he said.

Colorado, which saw its worst snowpack on record, has seen the steepest surge. Wildlife officials have recorded 10,019 bear reports so far this year, more than triple last year and more than double the state’s annual average.

In the past, John Livingston, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife public information officer, said, the impact was confined to only a few counties, but this year it’s statewide.

Livingston, who is part of the Statewide Bear Working Group, said he was alarmed in July. The number of reports had surpassed all of last year.

“That’s when it’s like, OK, buckle up,” he said.

Typically the fall is when bear encounters are most common, as bears prepare to survive winter hibernation.

The reports: A bear jumping on the tables of a restaurant. Exploring the inside of a ski lodge. Breaking into trucks and trash cans. Eating garbage and nabbing a bag from a fire station. Wandering into neighborhoods where they don’t typically go.

In Durango, a bear group posts photos showing what is left in the bears’ wake when trash is unsecured.

“We’re still in the thick of it,” Livingston said. “We’ve got another month and a half of really high levels of bear activity.”

Meanwhile, a growing population of humans and bears have spurred more bear encounters in the East.

One Connecticut black bear, known to officials as Bear 213 and to Simsbury neighbors as “White Paw,” had a string of encounters starting in 2022, when a resident spotted the bear approaching her door.

“He noticed me and very quickly came to investigate,” she wrote on a neighborhood Facebook group at the time, adding that the bear “was not easily deterred by three dogs going nuts on him.”

In the year that followed, the bear broke into two homes and a garage before wildlife officials put a geolocation collar around her neck to track her. Bear 213 eventually had a “rap sheet.”

Black bears were once nearly eliminated by European settlers. Reforestation efforts have since reestablished populations in at least 40 states.

Building homes and businesses closer to wild lands increases the likelihood of human-bear encounters.

While black bears’ natural diet is mostly plant-based, high-calorie foods like human garbage, bird seed, and pet food are all things that are “attractive to bears,” said Chris Servheen of IUCN Bear Specialist Group. And once bears succeed in eating human food, they continue doing so and mother bears will teach the behavior to their cubs.

Bears have entered about 60 homes in Connecticut this year, said Jason Hawley, the leading bear biologist at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

While many states use hunting to manage their black bear populations, Connecticut does not. Officials said it’s the only state with a notable bear population where hunting them is illegal.

North Carolina, New Jersey, and New York extended the hunting season in recent years. Florida recently reintroduced bear hunting, and California increased the number of bears that hunters may kill.

In 2024, “White Paw,” also known as Bear 213, was seen with three cubs, according to a Connecticut bear report. Her behavior got bolder.

She broke into garages, porches, barns, and sheds, ripping open freezers and trash cans, eating frozen cookies and drinking apple cider. She was not deterred by people. She growled and lunged at them, scaring one resident and his 30-pound goldendoodle.

She entered a home with her cubs in June of that year and tried again in July. The next day, Hawley’s staff euthanized her.

Some bears become so comfortable around people that they pose a safety threat, Hawley said.

“Bears are just going to do this indefinitely,” said Dave Wattles, the black bear and furbearer biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. “Those bears that develop these more serious behaviors like home entries, unfortunately, they’re not just going to stop that because they feel like it someday.”

Massachusetts has also seen an increase in bears entering homes, and Wattles suspects the bears learned the behavior in Connecticut.

Even in developed places like Massachusetts and Connecticut bears and humans have “minimal negative interaction,” Wattles said. “They’re not inherently aggressive towards people.”

Bear conflicts in which a person dies or is injured are rare. The most common cause is when a person surprises a bear at close range, prompting the bear to defend itself.

Recently, a 17-year-old awoke at 2 a.m. as a black bear entered her bedroom through a cracked window. Officials reported she covered herself in blankets as the bear approached her bedside and sniffed her head. After making a noise, the bear huffed and scratched her stomach. She screamed and sat up, and the bear left through the window.

Colorado has recorded 10 bear conflicts this year. The last fatality was in 2021.

“I wouldn’t say, and I haven’t said that they are more aggressive this year or more dangerous toward humans necessarily. They’re just willing to cross lines,” Livingston said.

In August, Eagle County sheriff’s deputies responded to a crowd of about 40 people filming a bear and her cubs outside of an Eagle-Vail apartment complex.

A week earlier, a man had been injured near the laundry room of the same complex during a bear incident.

After dispersing the crowd, deputies yelled and fired nonlethal rounds to get the bear to flee to a nearby river. The bear charged and a deputy fired several shots, killing it.

“I think somewhere along the line people have gotten really comfortable with being around bears,” Livingston said. “Like we’re forgetting that wild animals are wild.”

Bears adorn the names and logos of cabins, restaurants, coffee shops, and pizzerias across Gatlinburg, Tenn., at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The national park is the country’s most visited and home to nearly 2,000 black bears, with some that wander between the park and the city.

This year, like the rest of Tennessee, Gatlinburg has seen an increase in bear-related calls.

“You have so many bears in such a small area,” said Janelle Musser, assistant black bear program coordinator at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. “And then you add all those people, which means a lot of attractants like garbage.”

In 2023, Gatlinburg invested $3 million into more than 460 bear-proof dumpsters and later posted signs reminding the public that feeding bears is illegal.

Musser said the program is working but “experiencing some growing pains.” With the garbage less accessible, Musser said, bears are increasingly showing bold behavior to find food.

Videos show bears breaking into cars, opening doors, and running through parking lots and shopping centers as bystanders watch amused.

“All these videos, they’re not funny. As bear managers, we look at them and they’re scary to us,” Musser said. “We are thinking, oh my goodness, unfortunately, we’re going to have to try to capture that animal and put it down.”

What we teach the bears from these interactions, Musser said, is “When I get food, nothing bad happens. And all the humans do is take a photo of me.”

One of their biggest sources of food now is also one of Gatlinburg’s hardest to educate: tourists.

Many visitors don’t know what to do to secure their trash or how to respond to a bear sighting. And there’s no singular park entrance booth to educate people.

Removing food and trash may not be enough to deter bears especially when they are highly food-conditioned and used to being around people, said Hawley.

As bears and humans more frequently encounter each other, experts agree that bears are not the problem. Humans must adapt.

“The bears have been there for thousands of years,” Servheen said. “You just moved here.”

Whether you live in bear country or are visiting, learn what to do when you encounter a bear. Secure food, garbage and recycling. And never feed or approach a bear.

BearWise, an outreach and education program dedicated to helping people live responsibly with bears, has guides for home and outdoor safety, as well as safe ways to scare a bear.

Experts also recommend consulting local wildlife agencies for region-specific advice, including when and how to report bear activity.