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For more information about Chattabirds, visit chattabirds.org.
Ted Caldwell stands on the banks of an elbow in the Tennessee River no more than a mile across the Marion County line in a gorgeous area known as the Tennessee River Gardens.
"You see this tree swallow?" Caldwell asked Wednesday morning as a small bird flew aggressively overhead. "That's the first one I've seen this year."
Birds are abundant when the season is right in this quiet oasis occasionally visited by schools and other groups, and Caldwell can name each one based on its chirp.
"This place has afforded us the opportunity to see so much over the years," Caldwell said of his family's land.
"But this is not taking it to the public," he added.
Taking it to the public is Caldwell's new mission, and it's the concept driving his Chattabirds program that is luring ospreys - and the story of their resurgence in the Tennessee Valley - to one of the city's most iconic landmarks.
Instead of placing a third osprey platform at the Tennessee River Gardens, where ospreys are nesting after their winter in South America, Caldwell and a team of helpers refurbished and installed an osprey platform just off Maclellan Island in downtown Chattanooga last month.
The structure is visible from the Market Street Bridge and the Hunter Museum of Art, and if ospreys are going to claim their refurbished piece of urban habitat this spring, it will happen any day now.
"The goal is to engage the public," Caldwell said. "Surprise them, and then they start learning."
Though the osprey platform may seem like a rudimentary teacher, it's a visible symbol of the ospreys' local history and a decades-old effort to restore the species to the area after the chemical known as DDT used in pesticides wiped out the local population of many bird species in the 1970s.
Ospreys are plentiful throughout Southeast Tennessee now, but they were extinct here in the 1970s until ornithological enthusiasts like Bob Caldwell, Ted's uncle, and Ken Dubke, a family friend, began a process called "hacking" to bring them back.
The hacking process consists of relocating eggs to a man-made nest, where they hatch and are fed by humans.
When the contractor building the Veterans Bridge in the early 1980s consulted the Chattanooga Audubon Society about a possible mitigation project, Dubke said his wife suggested two osprey nest platforms on Maclellan Island.
"They've been standing there ever since," Dubke said.
The upstream platform farthest from the Market Street Bridge is still used by ospreys, but the downstream platform fell into disrepair and out of the birds' good graces recently. That's the platform Ted Caldwell refurbished through Chattabirds last month.
There is no guarantee ospreys will claim the platform this year. But once they do, history indicates they'll be back year after year. Some ospreys come back from their winter migrations early just to reclaim the platforms at the Tennessee River Gardens to nest their young.
"These are wild birds, and we can't tell them what to do," Dubke said. "But we can make it attractive for them to set up house, and that's what Ted has done."
The plan for Chattabirds is to install a camera on the platform and to, hopefully, place a sign on the Walnut Street Bridge explaining the ospreys' history. The sign would also have a QR code on it, allowing smartphone users to scan the code and have a live feed of the osprey nest appear on their screen that would also be accessible at chattabirds.org.
Ted Caldwell's sons have set up a fund through the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga to help with the costs, with the hope it can fund other naturalist projects in the future.
"I am fascinated with small birds," Caldwell said. "But to engage people, they're not going to look at a small bird. But if you show them a big bird, they get excited.
"They'll get excited about an eagle, and an osprey is plenty big enough, too."
Contact staff writer David Cobb at dcobb@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.