A large bird that lives by water and lives on fish. It flies high, spots a fish, then drops feet-first and grabs it with its talons. People also call it a fish hawk. You find ospreys by coasts, lakes, and rivers in many parts of the world; they are not rare, but they are a birdwatcher’s word more than a kitchen word. The name has a slightly messy history: it came from Late Middle English and Anglo-Norman, from a Medieval Latin phrase avis praedae, “bird of prey,” a general label that got stuck to this one bird — apparently because it sounded close to another old bird-name, ossifrage. So the English word looks special, but it started as a rather generic “hunter-bird” tag. Today it means this fish-eating hawk and nothing else.