The 2023 Osprey research season in Mobjack Bay, a sub-estuary of the Chesapeake Bay, began as others had for decades. Cruising the brackish waters in a small motorboat, Bryan Watts, director of William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology in Virginia, and Michael Academia, a researcher at the center, eased up to nesting platforms, boat houses, and abandoned docks dotting the shoreline. Lifting mirrors on long poles, they held them over elevated Osprey nests and used the reflections to peer inside. What the researchers saw in those mirrors—or, rather, what they didn’t see—was disturbing: Out of 167 nests they visited in Mobjack Bay and two nearby rivers, only 17 held live chicks. “It was a catastrophic failure,” says Watts, who has studied Ospreys in the area for decades. The Chesapeake Bay supports the largest Osprey population in the world: 10,000 to 12,000 breeding pairs of the only raptor that dives talons-first into the water to collect a meal. William &...