SHORTCOMMUNICATIONS

289

Wilson Bull., 110(2), 1998, pp. 289-290

First North American Record of a Melanistic Osprey
WilliamABSTRACT-The
first melanistic Osprey (Pan&onhaliaefus) for North America (second for the world) isdescribed and shown. It was seen and photographed insouthern Florida on 4 March 1997. Received 25 Aug.
1997, accepted 13 Jan. 1998.

The Osprey, Pundion ha&zetas, in spite ofits world-wide distribution, shows little geographic or individual variation in its plumage(Poole 1989, de1 Hoyo et al 1994). None of
the regional bird handbooks; e.g., for theWestern Palearctic (Cramp and Simmons
1980), for Africa (Brown et al 1982), forNorth America (Palmer 1988), or for Australia(Marchant and Higgins 1993); mention any
aberrant plumages for the Osprey. Recently,Millon (1994) briefly described a melanistic
Osprey seen in France. Herein I describe thefirst melanistic individual of this species forNorth America. A dark Osprey had been observed regularly in the same area of mangrove
islands over the past three years by Frank andGeorgia Garrett on their daily boat tours outof Chokoloskee, Florida. They took me to see
this unusual bird and I observed and photographed it for over three hours on the afternoon of 4 March 1997.
As seen in Fig. 1, the head, underparts, andunderwing coverts of this Osprey are darkbrown, with some buffy markings visible on
the underparts. The head is uniformly dark;
the black eye-line of Ospreys with normal
plumage is not noticeable, even at close range.
The pale undersides of the flight feathers differ from those of normal Ospreys (Wheelerand Clark 1995) in that they lack any darkbarring. The eye and leg colors and tail colorand pattern are the same as those of normal
Ospreys, as are its vocalizations.
When I first saw this unusual bird, it wasstanding on a typical Osprey nest on a small
mangrove island in the western end of Ever-’ 7800 Dassett Court, Apt. 101, Annandale,
20003; E-mail raptours@erols.com

VAS. Clark’glades National Park, approximately 5 km sswof the town of Chokoloskee. The Garretts told
me that they saw this bird build the nest. Another nest that it had built on an adjacent island was taken over by a pair of Ospreys innormal plumage three years previously.
Terres (1980) considers melanism to be anabnormal plumage, whereas Gross (1965) andSage (1962) consider that there are both “normal” and “abnormal” melanism-normal
being that of polychromatic species, with thedark birds comprising the dark morph, and abnormal being that of monochromatic species.
Gross (1965) reported melanism, both normaland abnormal, in only 29 species of North
American birds.
I never saw this dark bird in the companyof another Osprey. I watched it hunt for morethan 5 minutes on two forays-hoveringfor awhile in one location and then moving to another, in typical Osprey fashion. On one foray,
it caught a fish and took it to a perch and ate
the fish entirely, not sharing with another Osprey. The Garretts have never, in more than
three years of observations, seen this bird inregular close association with another Osprey,
as would be expected if it were mated.
Plumage color has little effect on mate selection in polychromaticspecies, because
most individuals of these species mate randomly regardless of color morph. The darkcoloration of birds like this unusual Osprey
may obscure plumage features necessary formating, e.g., the dark carpal patches on white
underwings of Ospreys in normal-plumage[see Olsen (1995) for a discussion of plumage
social signals.]. It is also possible that species
that are polychromatic are so because in thepast aberrant individuals were able to matewith normal birds and thus pass on their darkgenes, which are usually dominant when heterozygous (Sage 1962). Monomorphic species
would remain so when the occasional melanistic individuals cannot mate and pass ontheir genes.

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THE WILSON

FIG. 1.

BULLETIN

Vol. 110, No. 2, June 1998

First melanistic Osprey recorded in North America.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Frank and Georgia Garrett for taking me tosee the unusual Osprey, and Tim Dellinger for arranging for me to meet the Garretts. C. Henny, A. Poole,J. Schmitt, and B. Wheeler provided helpful comments
on previous draft manuscripts. I am grateful to A. Corso for pointing out the Millon citation and to M. Schlee
for translating it into English.

LITERATUREl

CITED

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The birds of Africa. Vol. I. Academic Press, London, UK.
CRAMP. S. AND K. E. L. SIMMONS. 1980. Birds of thewestern Palearctic. Vol. II. Oxford Univ. Press,Oxford, UK.
DEL HOYO, J., A. ELLIOT, AND J. SARGATAL (Eds.).
1994. Handbook of the birds of the World. Vol.
2. Lynx Editions, Barcelona, Spain.
GROSS, A. 0. 1965. Melanism in North American
birds. Bird Banding 36:240-242.

MARCHANT,S. AND P J. HIGGINS(Eds). 1993. Handbookof Australian, New Zealand, & Antarctic birds. Vol
2. Oxford Univ. Press, Melbourne, Australia.
MILLON, A. 1994. Premiere observation d’un Balbuzard Pecheur Pandion haliaefus melanique. Alauda 62:8.
OLSEN, P 1995. Australian birds of prey. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, Maryland.
PALMER, R. S. 1988. Handbook of North American
birds. Vol. 4. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
POOLE, A. E 1989. Ospreys: A natural and unnatural
history. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK.
SAGE, B. L. 1962. Albinism and melanism in birds.
British Birds 53:201-225.
TERRES,J. K. 1980. Encyclopedia of North American
birds. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
WHEELER, B. K. AND W. S. CLARK. 1995. A photographic guide to North American raptors. Academic Press, London.