The osprey is also known as the fish hawk, and as Pandion haliaetus, a name that comes from two parts: King Pandion II, the eighth king of Athens and grandfather of Theseus, and ἁλιάετος haliáetos, meaning “sea-eagle.” The word “osprey” has been around so long, no one really knows where it came from – it might be from avis praedae, Latin for the rather generic “bird of prey,” but I prefer the thought that it had something to do with ossifraga or “bone breaker.” They do that, up in their high nests, dismembering the small critters upon which they feed (and which they feed to their children, up there in plain view).
Says Wikipedia: “The osprey is unusual in that it is a single living species that occurs nearly worldwide. Even the few subspecies are not unequivocally separable.”
It’s an odd bird, the only member of the Pandionidae family – not quite a hawk, not quite an eagle. There are two known prehistoric species, but for the most part, ospreys are ospreys.
I’m intrigued that Wikipedia has a paragraph on their cries (including the transcription “chereek!” and an audio file) because an osprey sound also opens one of the world’s oldest literary classics, the Chinese Book of Odes, or Shi Jing. The first poem begins “Guan-guan go the ospreys….”
To me, that’s not what ospreys sound like, which makes me wonder what that long-ago poet really meant, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, that’s the sound the poet wrote (not a Chinese “chereek”), and that’s the bird the poet wrote making it (not a heron or ern or something), so “guan-guan” it is. Or was, about 400 years after the semi-mythical reign of King Pandion II (around 1300 BCE).
This bird, photographed in 2011, comes thanks to NOAA/NMFS/West Coast region, through the NOAA Photo Library, which is packed with sensational imagery.