Visit to bald eagle nest reveals a different kind of "family"

 

A red-tailed hawk chick is flanked by two bald eagle chicks/Jim McCormac

Nature: Visit to bald eagle nest reveals different kind of "family"

Columbus Dispatch
June 19, 2022

NATURE
Jim McCormac

These days, seeing a bald eagle nest isn’t that big a deal. It certainly was in 1979. That year, there were only four nests known in Ohio. The magnificent raptor was on its way out, largely the victim of DDT poisoning.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (good thing for acronyms!) was a pesticide commonly used for agricultural purposes. When it made its way into the food chain, the impact was disastrous on certain bird species. In the case of the bald eagle, DDT weakened egg shells, preventing successful hatches.

Richard Nixon was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1969, and one of his first major initiatives was addressing environmental issues. He signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence on Dec. 2, 1970, and one of the fledging agency’s first actions was to ban DDT. That happened in the summer of 1972.

The recovery of bald eagles following the DDT ban was a slow road. By 1989, there were a dozen nests in Ohio, and by 2000 nearly 60 nests were known.

The majestic national symbol is off to the races now. The Ohio Division of Wildlife estimates there are over 800 active nests in 2022, a meteoric increase.

I’ve seen a great many eagle nests over the years, but nothing like the one that I saw on June 3. Photographer Stephanie Gaiser sent me a note about a nest not far from Dublin in which one of the chicks was decidedly not like the others. Her tale inspired me to visit immediately.

Upon arrival to the nest, the two massive eagle chicks stuck out like sore thumbs. But, wait! Right between them was a comparatively elfin red-tailed hawk chick! It looked about half the eaglets’ size, yet everyone seemed to get along. At one point, an adult eagle came in and dropped a large fish in the nest. Everyone dug into the sushi.

By the time that I visited, both eaglets and hawk were nearly fully grown and frequently tested their wings with vigorous flapping. The young red-tail even made short hovers and test flights around the capacious aerie. The differences in size was striking. A bald eagle weighs about 10 pounds, is over 2.5 feet long, and has a wingspan of eight feet or so. The red-tailed’s stats: 2.5 pounds, 1.5 feet long, and the wings span about four feet.

The million-dollar question is how did the hawk end up in an eagle aerie? One theory is that one of the adult eagles plucked the red-tailed hawk chick from its nest and brought it back for food. The hawk miraculously survived the ordeal, and the eagles were fooled into thinking it one of their own.

I put little stock in that explanation. More likely is that a pair of red-tailed hawks attempted to appropriate the eagle nest for their own use, only to have the rightful owners appear and reclaim it. By then, the female hawk had already laid an egg or eggs, which were incubated along with the eagle eggs. And voila! Strange bedfellows.

This isn’t the first known occurrence of bald eagles rearing red-tailed hawks. Two occurrences have been documented in British Columbia, and one each in Michigan and Washington State.

Bald eagle chicks are highly competitive and known to engage in fratricide — they sometimes kill each other. Which makes it all the more surprising that a hawk chick would survive. But red-tailed hawks are very feisty and this one didn’t seem to take guff from his giant siblings.

I suspect they all were hatched about the same time, probably back in mid-March. Both species’ eggs require about the same incubation period: 30-35 days. But the hawks mature far faster and are ready to depart the nest after 45 days. Eagle chicks take around three months before they fledge.

Indeed, within a week of my visit, observers reported the adult eagles acting aggressively toward their adoptee — apparently, forcing it to take wing. Raptor youth sometimes need some prodding to make their first flight.

By now, the young red-tail is out on its own and hopefully, doing well. Its formative diet probably had lots of fish, and it would be interesting to know if it tries to continue with that diet.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jimmccormac.blogspot.com.

An ever-growing eagle aerie

Our national avian symbol, the Bald Eagle, sits with apparent pride atop a large aerie that it and its mate have jointly constructed. This nest is already massive, in spite of "only" being five or six years old. Bald Eagles will reuse nests for many years, and add material constantly.

A few weeks back, I spent a frigid, snowy, windy day watching the comings and goings of a pair of eagles in eastern Ohio. The nest is in an easily viewable locale, and attracts scores of onlookers. Fortunately, because of the Arctic weather during my visit, few others stopped by. It can become quite a circus along this road, I am told, but the gawking onlookers don't bother the birds a whit.

I had only planned on staying here for a few hours, but that stretched into 6-7 hours by the end of which I had nearly lost feeling in my extremities. Well worth it, though, to spend time watching the birds add sticks to the nest, interact with each other, and the world around them.

Some flyby American Crows divert the pair's attention briefly. While the sexes look identical, there is a conspicuous size difference. Females are bigger; up to 25% larger than the males.

This nest is in a large, seemingly healthy American beech (Fagus grandifolia). Here, one of the birds goes out on a nearby limb and snaps free one of the beech's branches. Beech are pretty tough, and as long as the tree remains healthy it should provide good supporting superstructure for the massive nest within its boughs.

An eagle prepares for landing with a bundle of sticks. These will be artfully threaded into the nest, and from my observations, usually by the female. Most times, nesting material was collected far from the nest and outside my field of view. On at least one occasion, an eagle flew into the stubble of a nearby corn field, and returned with talons full of old corn debris.

 A stick is carefully jimmied into position, while the other eagle watches attentively.

I'm not sure which sex is which here, but a minor spat had broken out over who would handle the insertion of a branch. It seemed that most times, when the smaller male would return with twigs, the female would soon appear if she wasn't already there, snatch them away and place them herself.

Bald Eagles are the second-largest raptor in North America, weighing up to 14 lbs. Accordingly, the birds can handle big sticks.

A landscape style shot illustrates the size of the aerie. Hard to believe its only about five years in the making. The mother tree has a lot to do with how large the nest can get. The arrangement of large limbs anchoring the nest dictate how tall the birds can pile the sticks over time. As this nest is in the crotch of a couple of very large sturdy trunks, and those trunks remain close together as they ascend, it appears that the birds can continue to expand upwards for quite some ways.

Big eagle nests can be their own downfall. As size and weight increase, the nest becomes more and more of a liability to the anchoring tree. Eventually windstorms can topple the nest, shear off branches to which the nest is attached, or even bring down the entire tree.

Photo credit: Francis Herrick

Here's the gold standard for giant Bald Eagle aeries: the so-called "Great Nest", which was located in Brownhelm Township, Lorain County, Ohio. This nest was about 12 feet from top to bottom, nearly nine feet across at the summit, and eventually attained a weight of around two tons. By the time the tree collapsed during a great storm on March 25, 1925, the nest had been in use for some five decades. It was anchored in a sturdy shellbark hickory (Carya laciniosa), and that probably explains much of the nest's longevity. Professor Francis Herrick of Western Reserve University spent years studying these eagles, even erecting a lofty observation platform in a nearby elm from which he could better observe and photograph the birds.

It'll be interesting to see how large the aerie featured in this blog eventually gets. Only time will tell, but the somewhat protected nature of the site, health and sturdiness of the tree, and the arrangement of the support limbs suggest that the nest will grow much larger than its current size.

Bald eagles prove healthy environment is essential

Bald eagles build a nest in eastern Ohio. There are now more than 200 nests known in the state.

Columbus Dispatch

February 5, 2017

NATURE

Jim McCormac

On June 20, 1782, the bald eagle was formally adopted as the symbol of the fledgling United States of America.

Contrary to myth, one of the committeemen involved in the decision, Benjamin Franklin, probably never protested the choice in favor of the wild turkey. However, in a missive to his daughter two years later, he did lament the bird as being of "bad moral character."

Franklin's sniping aside, the mascot was a good pick. Eagles have long represented power, nobility and freedom.

In the early days of the Congress of the Confederation, bald eagles flourished. The huge raptors would have been a familiar sight to most Americans.

By the turn of the 20th century, 100,000 pairs of nesting eagles were estimated to inhabit the U.S. Serious threats would soon loom, though.

Indiscriminate shooting and loss of habitat began to take their toll. The eagle population declined. An alarmed Congress enacted the Bald Eagle Protection Act in 1940 to help protect our national avian emblem.

A new, insidious threat would soon wreak havoc on America's eagles. A highly toxic pesticide, DDT, was introduced after World War II, and its use quickly became widespread.

DDT seeped into the ecological web and had terrible effects on predators that ate tainted prey. It caused severe thinning of eggshells, leading to a collapse in reproduction. By the 1960s, eagle populations were in a tailspin.

Richard Nixon squeaked into the office of the president of the United States through the election of 1968. Public outrage over environmental degradation was nearing its zenith, and Nixon noticed.

In 1970, Nixon formed the Environmental Protection Agency, and one of its major issues was a ban on DDT. Finally, its hand somewhat forced by environmentalists, the EPA banned DDT in 1972.
The following year, 1973, saw the enactment of the Endangered Species Act, which ramped up protections for imperiled organisms.

These measures were just in time. By 1979, Ohio's bald-eagle population was down to four nesting pairs. The situation was similarly dire in much of the continental U.S.

As DDT gradually was purged from the environment, and other protective strategies bore fruit, eagle populations began to rise. In 2007, the federal government delisted the formerly endangered bald eagle. From a low of 417 nests in the lower 48 states in 1963, eagles had rebounded to nearly 10,000 pairs by the time of delisting.

Today, there are over 200 nests in Ohio, and new aeries turn up each year. At least one nest is in view of Downtown's skyscrapers. Winter eagle concentrations can be almost Alaskan in impressiveness. Recent congregations at Old Woman Creek National Estuarine Research Reserve on Lake Erie have numbered nearly 50 birds.

There has been much recent talk of neutering the EPA and dismantling many environmental protections. I hope that decisionmakers recall our relatively recent dirty history of pollution and toxicity, and are aware of how those problems were fixed.

A healthy environment is not only good for eagles, it's also good for us.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jimmccormac.blogspot.com

Bald Eagle relieves Lake Erie of a fish!

I journeyed to one of my favorite Lake Erie haunts today, the city of Huron, in Erie County. The lakefront here features the mouth of the Huron River, and it is nearly always birdy. Even today, when the lake was placid, the skies were mostly blue, and winds were calm. Bad weather makes good birding, along Lake Erie.

After spending an hour or so at the far end of the municipal pier without seeing much in the way of avian diversity, I started the long plod back to the mainland. As I did, I began to hear the calls of Snow Buntings passing overhead. As nearby Nickel Plate Beach is often a good bunting locale, I figured some of the birds might have put down there, so it was off to the beach.

An adult Bald Eagle prepares to snatch a fish from the waters of Lake Erie. As always, click the photo to enlarge, and you'll see the victim swimming in the bottom right hand corner of the image. A millisecond after this photo was made, the eagle snatched the scaly treat.

All morning, Bald Eagles had been soaring about, occasionally putting up clouds of resting gulls. Both adults and juvenile eagles were around, and rarely was one not in sight. As I was stalking the sands of Nickel Plate Beach seeking buntings, I noticed an adult eagle coming near the beach. Just as I glanced over at it, the bird made a sudden careening dive for the surface, but missed the fish. Figuring he/she would try again, I got ready, and sure enough, in came the bird and this time it was not to be deprived its fish.

This image was two shots after the one above, and my camera's burst rate is about seven shots a second. The fish never knew what hit it.

Bald Eagles sometimes get a rap for being vulturelike and frequently noshing on carrion and other easy - dead - pickings. But they are highly adept fishermen, and I've seen scenes like this play out many times. I'm just not usually fortunate enough to be able to capture them with my camera.