The osprey: the county's densest nesting ground

2009 to the present

The record: The osprey's South Bend record opens in the Tribune's 2009 outdoors pages, in a headline that pairs this entry with the next one — "Falcons AND ospreys, OH MY": three pairs of ospreys nesting at Potato Creek State Park that year, a pair along the St. Joseph River behind Saint Mary's College in South Bend, and a young pair building a nest at the South Bend Country Club that did not yet count as a breeding pair. Six years later the state-endangered osprey's county standing had a superlative on it. The Indiana DNR's May 2015 release, in the act of announcing Potato Creek's first eaglets, notes that the park "also has four nesting pairs of ospreys again this year, the highest concentration of any area in Indiana" — four pairs on and around one 327-acre lake, in a species Indiana still carried as endangered. The Tribune's June 2015 raptor survey of the county adds the rest of the map: the four Potato Creek nests, one at St. Patrick's County Park — on a pole and platform along a looping trail by the river, at the park's southern end, an artificial structure of exactly the kind erected for the species — and another near Saint Mary's College, most showing potential that spring of hatching young. The osprey is a fish hawk, and its county map is a water map: Worster Lake, the river at St. Patrick's, the river behind Saint Mary's. No platform-construction date or sponsoring program for the county's structures was found in the sources reached; the nests themselves, counted year by year in the press of record, are the documentation.

Sources:

1. "Falcons AND ospreys, OH MY," South Bend Tribune (2009) — three pairs at Potato Creek; the Saint Mary's river pair; the South Bend Country Club builders (the article as catalogued in the Michiana-area newspaper index).
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources release, 8 May 2015 — four nesting osprey pairs at Potato Creek, "the highest concentration of any area in Indiana."
3. Joseph Dits, South Bend Tribune, 4 June 2015 — the county's osprey nests that spring, incl. the St. Patrick's pole-platform nest and the Saint Mary's nest; the species' state-endangered standing as the paper states it.