The Last Osprey, a 30-minute documentary from filmmaker William McKeever, takes viewers into the Chesapeake Bay — home to the world’s largest osprey population and the setting for one of the most urgent conservation stories unfolding in North America today. The film follows osprey families through a nesting season, capturing both the breathtaking artistry of these expert fishers and the grim reality inside their nests: chicks are starving to death because their parents can no longer catch enough food to bring home. Through stunning aerial cinematography, intimate close-up footage, and expert commentary from Dr. Bryan Watts — one of the country’s leading ornithologists, based at the College of William & Mary — the film transforms a quiet ecological collapse into a visible, human story.

At the heart of the crisis is a small, oily fish called menhaden, the cornerstone of the Bay’s food web and the osprey’s primary prey. The Last Osprey exposes a high-stakes, three-way battle over its fate. Conservationists and scientists are warning that industrial-scale harvesting is stripping menhaden from the Bay faster than the population can recover, leaving osprey parents to return to their nests empty-taloned. Commercial fishing interests defend the harvest as sustainable, citing the jobs and revenue it supports. And caught in the middle are state and federal politicians who hold the regulatory power to set catch limits — and who, so far, have been unwilling to impose the protections scientists say are urgently needed. The film makes clear that the death of these birds is not an act of nature; it is the direct outcome of a human contest over money, power, and priorities.

If nothing changes, the future for the Chesapeake’s ospreys is grim. Their reproductive replacement rate has already fallen to a dangerously low point, meaning fewer chicks are surviving each year than are needed to sustain the population. Without meaningful intervention, the iconic osprey colonies that have defined the Bay’s skies for generations could enter a slow, irreversible decline — and because the osprey is a living indicator of the health of the entire ecosystem, what is killing them now will not stop with them. The Last Osprey asks the question that should haunt every viewer: are we witnessing the final chapter for the ospreys of the Chesapeake Bay, or will we act in time to write a different ending?