Bald Eagles in Massachusetts

We have a Christmas bird count near us and this year i was in charge of counting and identifying seagulls, boy they got the wrong guy. fortunately I had a partner who knew gulls.
That, however, is not the point I wanted to make. we accounted for 45 eagles in our count group. This count takes place at the Conowingo Dam on the lower susquehanna River. Susquehanna is an iroquois phrase in two parts

susqu ea , means 'hey stupid , look out for the rocks"

Hannae, means "too late"

Anyway , the eagle group saw 45 different eagles at the dam. Its a hydropower dam and the fish get sucked through the turbines and come flying out the Tailrace where they are stunned or worse. The eagles and gulls gang up and snatch the fish from the surface and live like kings all winter. They come here every fall about November and stay till feb, when they migrate back up to n Pa and NY state. Many will actually start nest building around now (late Dec , early JAn)

its a real miracle seeing how theyve made a return from near extinction in pA. In 1972 they said that there was only 1 nesting pair in pa and that was along the Ohio border in Lake pymatuning. today there are about 300 pairs in Pa. I dont know where these all came from but Ive been told that, with the void , eagles began migrating from the farther North populations .
So-were all enjoying a baldy come back. Now, however, we are in a deep woods songbird crisis. The orioles, tanagers and other colored finches are disappearing..
No problem with seagulls, they , im afraid, are more like cockroaches

Think I've seen a few over the Wachussett reservoir... damn big birds.

Osprey... not quite as huge, but I've seen 'em closer. They nest over at the ancestral summer place... (mebbe an August gathering?)...

And of course flocks of buzzards over Buzzard's Bay...

Farmerman - they say there are several reasons why the baldys are coming back. There are 2 main ones (they speculate): DDT (is that the right pesticide?) has depleted from the system so their eggs can produce hatchlings and the winters have been milder so they can fish through them. We (maybe PA is involved with the term Northeast) have a 6% increase over the last few years.

Here we also have a rebound in oriels, bluebirds and such. Also, the osprey are back, the coyotes too.

SP - flocks of buzzards eh? We have opsrey in the marsh my parents' house is on. But, they don't always nest there and last summer the platform toppled so maybe they won't come back for a while. And even though it's right there in the marsh, it's still a third-mile away - not easy to see mush even with binoculars.

We gots an osprey platform on top of an unused telephone pole that's been in constant use for ten or fifteen years.

Sometimes those suckers come right over the house. Every once and a while they leave a littel something on the deck... piscavores, doncha know...

cool. we have big loud owls and red-tailed hawks at our house.

There has been an on going effort at Quabin to reintroduce them for the better part of a decade now. Looks like it is taking hold.

It is and it's spreading!

you say that orioles are increasing at your area littlek/ Its just the opposite here. We still see many in the spring and we always put out chunks of oranges and apples, but the counts are going down. Most of the pros say that the big problem is in the central AMerican and Mexican forests where theyve wintered. these forests are being dropped

BTW, the bald eagle is slanted to come off the endangered species list soon. With that, so goes a great deal of its protection.

farmer, we had a bad recovery after DDT polluted our birds. Oriels are coming back, not in large numbers, but they're around. There was concern for the red wing black birds because of deforrestation (or deshrubization?) a few years back. Again, we still have them around, but I dunno what their numbers look like over all.

Bill - eeyep. Well, I think we had a pretty good dose of "wow, we almost killed off our national symbol". At least for the bald eagles, I think they'll be kept closely watched under very protective eyes.

we had 2 doofae shoot a bald eagle each this year. one guy was drunk and was just partying (with a 30060 the other guy said he mistook it for a goose (he didnt even have a hunting license) Eagles that we see are no longer afraid of humans. They catch fish and then land in a tree not more than 50 feet away and just snack on fish and watch us.
Weve got an abundance of cardinals at the feeders this year. Its like A home game in St Louis

So, what happened to the doofae? Yep, the baldy at the lake didn't seem too keen on sticking around us, but he stayed long enough for us to get really close.

So, what about the squirrle/pigeon scat - do you figure it was a different bird of prey?

I spotted a bald eagle in New Jersey about 10 - 12 years ago. I reported the sighting to the Fish and Game commission in Trenton -- and they told me that there are several nesting pairs in the Garden State.

It is a very exciting experience.

Southern Illinois and the "Kentucky Lakes" region (the Tennessee and the Cumberland empty into the Ohio above the junction with the Mississippi, but the lower rivers have been damned to create huge lakes) have had quite a comeback. As long ago as 1988, when i left Southern Illinois, there were believed to be 12 to 15 nesting pairs in the Crab Orchard WLR/Rend Lake region. The Kentucky Lakes have a great many. It may not be perfect, but certainly great strides have been made making the world a little less inhospitable to life forms . . .

Great news!

Little k-sorry, The two doofii, were equally arrested and one was heavily fined. The other , a hunter, lost his hunting privileges for life and also was fined. I guess punishments are not as severe as we might wish. Id have liked to see, each of these guys do pub service in a raptor habitat and restoration project , just to sensitize them a bit more. Maybe work in a wildlife rehab center , where all kinds of wildlife that get shot by our slob bretheren (and sisteren) are brought for treatment and reacclimation to the wild. then they might see the consequences of these senseless acts that their like-minded cretin buddies have caused.
I dont see jail time as beneficial because, with the law being what it is, their individual fights to stay free would become a constitutional matter rather than a lesson to respect life,consequently , as happens many times, the perps would begin feeling justified and put upon by an evil system.
Pub service in a wildlife rehab or restoration project would focus all the attention on the perps acts , and they would, hopefully, reflect o the error of their ways and maybe theyd turn into another Ned fisher Pennsylvanian (Ned was a real advocate of wildlife corridors and restoration projects) hes kind of Pas Aldo leopold. (of course Rachel Carson was from PA too, but thats not my point dammit)

Fella's hiking in the Sierra Madre, up high, when he falls, and baddly spraining his ankle, he is left stranded on a cliff side. A few days on, when his rationed water is running out, and he hasn't eaten for days, he comes out of his delirious state long enough to see a California condor peached nearby, and he musters the strength to bash its head in with a rock, and feed himelf. Two days later, he is picked up by the Forest Service.

Because he killed the condor, he ends up in Federal court, but its largely a formality, because everyone understands that his survival was at stake. The judge gives him two weeks community service, and then, as they adjourn, motions him up to the bench . . .

"You know, i've been a hunter all my life, and i just wondered . . . what does condor taste like?"

"Well, your honor, it's a different flavor, not like anything you've probably eaten . . . i'd say, a cross between snowy owl and bald eagle . . . "

just make that up? that was pretty damn good. Im gonna use it at the annual Roadkill Dinner

Heard it from someone else, don't remember who . . . it is a good one, though . . .

. . . speaking of road-kill, what's for dinner ?