Bald eagle! People are reporting sightings with great excitement. There is something about an eagle. . .
They’re are on the increase, and in our region odds of seeing them in winter are higher than in the breeding season. No leaves on trees helps.
Mature eagles – the classic white head and tail – might be northern breeders pushed south as waterways freeze over. Not true migrants, they travel just far enough to find open water.
Immature eagles can be told by a dark plumage. It takes up to five years for an eagle to reach sexual maturity and full adult plumage. They do a lot of wandering before they establish a breeding territory.
As piscivores (great word), bald eagles tend to follow their main food: fish. As opportunistic scavengers their diet is varied, but waterways remain a magnet.
The eagle pictured here spent time in downtown Peterborough along the Contoocook. Joyce Carroll had seen it a couple times from her house just upriver from the library.
Her Jan. 6 email: “It was worth bundling up this morning to get this photo taken from Depot Square. Watched it perched for about 20 minutes.”
I’d planned to write about winter eagles this week. Coincidentally the New York Times Magazine lead article Sunday was about bald eagles.
The eagle headshot on the cover was ugly, the article illustrations were uglier, it was titled “National Burden,” and the brief author profile said, “He is working on a book about meat.”
I love the New York Times, but have found over the years that it’s clueless about the workings of the natural world.
The article centered on a heifer and poultry farmer in Georgia. Perhaps it was the ducks and geese that attracted the eagles to the farm more than the chickens. Bald eagles know ducks and geese. In the past five years, fall migration has delivered increasing numbers until “bald eagles hung on the branches. . . like Christmas ornaments.” And ate a lot of chickens.
Photos that we’ve all seen of bald eagles congregating on Alaskan rivers to feed on spawning salmon come to mind.
For eagle history, along with other avian “apex predators” they declined in the DDT years when the chemical promised to rid the U.S. of malaria and croplands of insect pests. The chemical washed into waterways, impacting the food chain from smallest on up, in greater concentrations each link up the chain.
Adult eagles and pelicans and ospreys survived, but their eggshells thinned and cracked. No offspring.
New Hampshire hosted no nesting eagles, 1949 to 1989, and Georgia experienced a similar dearth.
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 began to turn the tide as federal and state agencies initiated ambitious recovery programs. DDT was banned at about the same time.
The New Hampshire story is a good one. Both the last eagle pair in 1949 and the pair that returned in 1989 chose the same nest tree on the shore of Lake Umbagog.
Carl and I made a pilgrimage to see that pair, and here’s what I wrote 25 years ago: “Through morning fog hanging heavy on Lake Umbagog, two large birds and a large stick nest take hazy shape in an old bare white pine – a legendary white pine. I punch Carl. I can’t believe we’re seeing this tree, these eagles.”
We were with Chris Martin, NH Audubon’s wildlife biologist who has worked along with NH Fish and Game on endangered species recovery. He’s climbed a lot of trees and scaled a lot of cliffs in the recovery efforts for eagles and peregrine falcons.
He also oversees the annual surveys of both breeding and wintering eagles – recording record numbers most years. The 2016 breeding survey confirmed 56 territorial pairs, with 42 pairs actively incubating and 51 young successfully fledged.
Take a moment to digest what effort is necessary to tally those three categories.
The New York Times author didn’t know to refine territorial pairs down to actual egg incubation, but the point remains that Georgia and New Hampshire eagle numbers are robust and rapidly getting robuster.
National Audubon’s Fall 2016 magazine profiled the same Georgia farmer and the eagles. It’s a much better read. Will Harris is fourth generation to run the family farm, and he’s transformed it from heavy dependence on chemical fertilizers to true animal and soil husbandry, organic all the way.
As for the wintering eagles, he cites the biblical concept of 10 percent tithing — in this case to the eagles — but is actively pursuing eagle deterrence as the growing number of chicken kills has surpassed 10 percent.
He also knows that monocultures aren’t natural, whether it’s crops or an eagle’s diet. Note that as an entrepreneur as opportunistic as foraging bald eagles, he also rents out six cottages to people who want to see a lot of eagles.
I don’t know where the eagle story will go. They’ve not reached pre-European settlement numbers, yet, or the number in 1782 when bald eagles became our nation’s emblem, olive branch in one talon, 13 arrows in the other.
Their numbers are increasing, but there’s more people, too, of course, and associated impacts: fewer salmon spawning; fewer fish in the sea; less natural eagle habitat. It is a story unfolding.
At the Women’s March in Concord last Saturday, a mature bald eagle flew over the crowd. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I imagine an olive branch peace on Earth.
Backyard Birder by Francie Von Mertens appears every other week in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.