There’s happy news at the Harmar bald eagle nest, observed by Gina Gilmore.
Gina was on hand on Wed 26 Feb 2020 at 1:57pm when she saw — and filmed — the female bald eagle behaving as if she had laid her first egg. The bird stood in the nest, often looked down between her feet, and remained standing as if she was waiting for an egg to dry. Then she settled down to begin incubation.
Click here or on the image above to see Gina’s video. When you play the video, click on the speaker icon at bottom right to turn on sound …
This egg is the 10th at the Harmar site since nesting was first confirmed in 2013/2014 and the 1st for 2020. A second egg is due today or tomorrow, 28 or 29 Feb, at Harmar.
Thank you, Gina Gilmore, for filming this happy event. Without an eaglecam on the nest, we rely on observers like Gina to note behavior that indicates an egg has been laid. See more of Gina’s photos on her Facebook page.
Happy news on Valentine’s Day! Last evening the Audubon Society of Western PA (ASWP) announced:
[Pittsburgh, PA, February 13, 2020] – Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania confirms an egg in the Hays, PA Bald Eagle nest. The egg, laid at 6:30 pm this evening, is visible in the nest on the eagle cam when the incubating adult stands up: http://aswp.org/pages/hays-nest. There is typically a 2-3 day span in between eggs being laid in a Bald Eagle nest. In 2019, the Hays Bald Eagles laid three eggs; two hatched and the juveniles successfully fledged the nest.
See great photos at the Eagles of Hays PA Facebook page. Dana Nesiti visits the Allegheny Passage trail and other sites along the Monongahela River to capture the eagles in their natural setting.
Coopers hawk eyeing a brush pile that’s full of birds (photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
When a predator shows up at your backyard feeders the songbirds need a place to hide. If you don’t have any evergreens, you can make an instant shelter with a brush pile.
Brush piles don’t look tidy but they benefit birds. Look how this one frustrates an active Coopers hawk in Wisconsin.
Here is one of the Cooper’s or one of the Sharp-Shinneds in the area attacking the bird brush pile! We spend a lot of time repairing it, but the small birds love it for protection! #birding#backyardbirding#Wisconsinpic.twitter.com/Xjzw4vKQSK
Clean your feeders: Bird feeders accumulate mold and bacteria, including Salmonella. Clean them every two to four weeks by emptying and soaking for 10 minutes in a weak solution of 10% bleach (1 part bleach, 9 parts water) described at The Spruce: Bird Feeder Cleaning Tips.
Keep your cat indoors.
Provide shelter (described above).
(photo by Marcy Cunkelman, video tweet from @RLJSlick)
The amazing photo below of an eagle’s claw and a human hand left me wondering, Who is this bird and why are his claws so big? Today I’ll tell you a bit of his life story.
Juvenile crowned eagle in captivity (image from r/pics on Reddit)
Shaped like a giant goshawk with a feather crest, the crowned eagle (Stephanoaetus coronatus) lives in the riparian forests of sub-Saharan Africa where it eats monkeys, small forest antelopes (duikers), “mouse-deer” (chevrotains) and “rock rabbits” (rock hyrax). Click on the links to see photos of these unusual animals.
Crowned eagles weigh only 6-10 pounds, smaller than bald eagles, yet they routinely capture mammals twice as heavy as they are. Reports say they can fly with prey that outweighs them, but they normally rip it apart on the ground and cache pieces in the trees. For this lifestyle they need large talons.
Deforestation in Africa is destroying the crowned eagles’ high-canopy habitat and their population is declining. They are listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN.
For many years now my First Bird of the Year is always the American crow because hundreds fly over my house before dawn, cawing as they disperse from the roost. The only way a different species could win “First Bird” is if I cheated and ignored the obvious.
This year I decided to change the challenge to Best Bird of the First Day. My 2020 winner is the turkey vulture that used to be absent on January 1.
Turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) are South American birds who’ve expanded their range into North America, year-round residents in the southern U.S. but only summer visitors up north.
Vultures migrate because they can’t eat our winter food supply. Though carrion is available year-round their beaks aren’t strong enough to rip open frozen food.
However climate change is doing them a favor. Last month in Pittsburgh most days were barely below freezing and five recent days were as much as 20 degrees above normal. Nothing was frozen.
Turkey vultures used to leave Pittsburgh for the winter but in this century a few began to linger here. The most reliable group roosted within sight of Dashields Dam on the Ohio River. Last month additional vultures were reported during the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count. Even so, I was surprised to see two of them soaring over McKnight Road on the first day of the year.
As more turkey vultures become year-round residents of Pittsburgh we can sing “Here to stay is the new bird” for yet another species.
(photo and map from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the original)
In 2015, when drones flew over sensitive urban spaces in France, the government passed new laws to restrict the airspace. However some places are so sensitive that rogue drones must be removed if they attempt a flyover. How can they be downed in mid-air without hurting anyone? The French military came up with an effective solution.
In 2016 France’s Army Air Force began a falconry program with four golden eagle chicks, named for the four Musketeers. Golden eagles are the only bird large enough to safely bring down a 4.5 to 9 pound drone (2-4 kilograms). The eagles were trained to view drones as prey and learned to catch them in mid air.
The eagles did so well that the Air Force made plans to add four more eagles the following year.
Click here or on the screenshots to watch a 2017 video of the eagles in training.
American and Eurasian kestrels are masters at hovering.
Here a Eurasian kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), filmed at the Isle of Portland, UK, faces the wind and hovers so skillfully that it flutters and twists without moving it’s head.
Steppe eagles (Aquila nipalensis), pictured above, breed on the steppes of Eurasia and spend the winter in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, India or Southeast Asia, passing through Central Asia on their way south.
Steppe eagles are endangered in Russia and Central Asia, threatened by persecution and power lines which they encounter on migration so the Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network has fitted 13 of them with cell-enabled backpacks to track their paths. They plan to mitigate the most dangerous locations frequented by eagles.
The tracking backpacks send four text messages a day with date, time and the eagles’ GPS coordinates. If the bird is far from the cell network, the tracker stores the data until the eagle gets near a tower.
This method worked well in 2018 because most of the eagles traveled near the Russian cell network. This year, however, an eagle named Min spent the summer far from the network in a remote part of Kazakhstan. Her backpack stored months of data that it couldn’t transmit until she flew near a cell tower in Iran (map below).
In October the researchers were stunned to receive a cellphone invoice with eagle-sized roaming charges. They’d budgeted 15 roubles/message but roaming in Iran is 49 roubles/message. In just one texting session Min used up the entire year’s budget for all the eagles!
What to do? They set up a crowd-funding appeal that raised more than enough to cover this year’s charges (100,000 roubles) and Russia’s Megafon network offered to cover the cost, too. So the project is saved.
p.s. What is 100,000 worth in U.S. dollars? About $1,560.
(photos and range map from Wikimedia Commons, Min’s hand-drawn route on map from Pinterest, steppe eagles’ migration map from Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network. Click on the captions to see the originals)
NOTES: Steppes are prairies or scrubland similar to the Great Plains and Great Basin of North America. Steppe eagles face an additional threat: Because they eat carrion they are dying of diclofenac, just as vultures are.
