[Bristol-Birds] Fw: exceedingly rare oddity-- TWRA's enormous opportunity
- From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Bristol-birds" <bristol-birds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:29:30 -0400
----- Original Message -----
From: Wallace Coffey
To: TN-birds
Sent: July 16, 2012 02:28
Subject: Re: exceedingly rare oddity-- TWRA's enormous opportunity
It is good to welcome the opportunity to continue this discussion. We should
always have enough dignity to consider all opinions. Golden Eagles have been
nesting in Middle Tennessee for 20 years. It has been more than a decade since
nesting evidence was discovered. The most important fact is that a fledgling
has been found and is in captivity. To squander this opportunity to consult
several knowledgeable and vastly-experienced Golden Eagle researchers in
helping determine a viable and logical path forward would be the real tragic
waste. Providing TWRA with the encouragement and opportunity to do little or
nothing is, in effect, inviting the agency to pull a medieval eagle hood over
non-game management. That is exceedingly reckless and foolish posturing. TWRA
should not make bad decision or no decisions at all simply because there will
probably always be desperately-need non-game funding. TWRA needs to quickly
move forward with enlightened and progressive options. If the scientific
community's thoughtful consensus is to do nothing, then that would be
better-founded than management with little more than memories and humble
opinions. We should stand for the very best progressive, professional and
scientific consultation in eastern North America. That and nothing less.
Wallace Coffey
Bristol, TN
----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Sloan
To: TN-Bird Listserv
Sent: July 16, 2012 11:52
Subject: [TN-Bird] Re: exceedingly rare oddity-- TWRA's enormous opportunity
I'll add one comment to this. While this is certainly interesting news, I
would hate to see TWRA (again) waste valuable time and money on the issue of
breeding Golden Eagles. The nearest breeding population is 700+ miles away,
and there is scant evidence (nothing more than vague anecdotes) that this
species was ever a native breeding species in Tennessee in the modern era,
notwithstanding TWRA's prior (and very misguided in my opinion) efforts to
"reintroduce" (actually "introduce") the species to the state. In my opinion,
given the facts we have available, this fledgling is highly likely to be a
byproduct of those efforts. Certainly the bird should be cared for and
hopefully released, but beyond that, expediture of any of our desperately
limited non-game dollars on this bird is, in my opinion, a tragic waste, when
we have so many much more important issues that are already starved for funding.
The wintering Golden Eagles are a bit of a different story, and in my opinion
that side of the equation definitely merits further study and conservation
effort.
Chris Sloan
Nashville, TN
http://www.chrissloanphotography.com
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 8:30 PM, Wallace Coffey <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here we stand at the doorstep to ornithological history !
Putting an exceedingly rare oddity of getting our hands on a fledgling
Golden Eagle in perspective, in Tennessee, is astounding.
It seems like when Scott Somershoe, Polly Rooker and an unnamed wildlife
officer from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency shared what they have been
very busy with, there should have been hundreds of us with Skype technology
standing to give them a thunderous ovation.
But maybe that is premature. Maybe they have not yet come to the best
part of their story and we are waiting breathlessly to hear the grand plan and
news.
We hope we'll all see a satisfying sample of a ton of well-crafted digital
photos of the bird, it being delivered, identified, diagnosed, treated and
released. The results from the images being flashed electronically to the best
Golden Eagle minds available in at least eastern North America. To learn how
the experts affirmed and confirmed anything and everything known about this
juvenile and fledgling aging of this Golden Eagle. The US Fish & Wildlife has
said a fledgling is a juvenile that has taken the first flight from the nest,
but is not yet independent.
At least we will be excited to know how many weeks of age this fledgling is
and what sex the bird is. The protocols and standards are well known. Sex is
important because males and females have different tendencies to wander.
We are going to be amazed at how much TWRA has done during the past two
weeks the bird has been in captivity and while Somershoe has been up to his
elbows in diapers with his own fledgling which he has been helping care for at
home.
It will be a thrill to see the names of all the advisors who have been
pulled into a quick response team to help guide TWRA thru these and the
pending, crucial, research opportunities that may not come our way again for
decades, if ever.
This fledgling Golden Eagle, found near Cordell Hull Lake, in upper Middle
Tennessee, is going to be a data bonanza.
Todd Katzner, Bob Hatcher, Jeff Cooper, Trish Miller, Al Cecere and Dave
Buhler are the kinds of names we'll be hearing about. Cecere and guys like
Buhler probably all have shared excellent input about how to go quickly high on
the mountain with this opportunity. Hatcher was a TWRA non-game and eagle guy
years ago when that was a good thing.
What they may already have in the works is a checklist of to-dos which
we'll see unfolding before our eyes within weeks if not months:
-- first is all the simple documentation mentioned above but also
probably the DNA samples which may tell us things our minds might never have
imagined. That probably goes without saying.
-- not only will this bird be a public spectacle and public relations
coup for TWRA but it will carry another first. The first Golden Eagle
fledgling from this southern region to every go aloft carrying one of the sexy
and data-dumping, non-invasive, monitoring scheme of a novel high-frequency
GPS-GSM telemetry systems for tracking Golden Eagles among other migratory
birds. It uses solar -powered transmitters and cellphone transmissions to
relay satellite track data every few minutes or even every few seconds as
needed. It was designed by Katzner's company, Cellular Tracking Technologies
LLC. There are Golden Eagles transmitting data with these systems over much of
North America and even their breeding areas in Canada. But maybe never ever
from a fledgling Golden Eagle from our southern region.
-- for the first time we will know about any survival and what it does
for the next several years before it is old enough to breed. Does it, too,
breed in the region ? Is it part of a breeding population of Golden Eagles we
have known little about? Was it from a population that nest on high elevation
cliff faces or artificial structures or even in Tennessee trees ?
-- will the tracking of this bird lead us back to its parents or even
near the nest where it was fledged ? Will we learn if it can't survive or does
not survive this first winter ? Where will it winter ? Will we know the
transmission signal has not moved for days and go to find it downed again ?
Can it once again be nursed back to health and make another try ? Or do we
simply retrieve the transmitter to be used another day by whomever wants to own
it and burry the carcass and end this adventure ?
-- as a fledgling, it may have been within a few short miles of where
it hatched or actually within sight of the nest when TWRA picked it up. Will
tracking lead us to where it roosts and what preference there is for a
Tennessee roost site ?
-- will we learn that TWRA has plans to bait the site with dead deer
carcasses this winter and affix cameras to monitor all around this area with
several such cameras and baitings ? Will we not only get wildlife cam photos
of the parents but also of this bird feasting at one of the carcasses ? Will
we find out there are a dozen Golden Eagles are more in that vicinity ? The
Bristol Bird Club's Clinch Mountain Golden Eagle group determined with such a
set up that we had 15 Golden Eagles wintering in just one small part of Russell
County, VA a year ago.
-- will we soon find out that TWRA is following the same approach that
the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries has been busy at for the
past few winters by capturing those birds with a rocket net and placing the
Katzner-design satellite tracking units on them ? Then we will know if our
nesting birds are a sedentary couple that does not migrate but stays in the
area? Will we even learn, as Virginia and others have than wintering birds
wander over a large area that may include hundreds of miles of regular winter
travel around the area ? Will this fledgling or other tracked adults wander off
into the Cumberland's for a few weeks or wherever ? And, with tracking units,
find where they are nesting and watch next year's nest to see if more
fledglings survive into the wilds of Tennessee ?
-- will we learn that this is the first step in allowing TWRA to help
guide the placement of wind turbines on our mountain tops and protect our
wintering Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles ?
-- it was not like Somershoe needed to leaves messages and try to
introduce himself to Katzner with babbling baby eagle talk. Scott is a member
of Katzner's prestigious Eastern Golden Eagle Working Group which is based out
of the University of West Virginia. Scott has been working in collaboration
with biologists and wildlife managers from the US and Canada dedicated to
developing a more complete understanding of Golden Eagle life history and
ecology throughout eastern North America.
-- Katzner has recently been to Canada to see for himself where and
what was going on with a Golden Eagle found injured in New York state and sent
back to the wild with one of his hi-tech telemetry units. It was an amazing
research effort and it was fascinating what he learned.
-- Jeff Cooper is also a member of that team. He is a Tennessee Tech
University graduate who is working with Golden Eagle telemetry for the Virginia
Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. He probably has more than two dozen
satellite-tracked Golden Eagles in Canada right now which he trapped in western
Virginia during winter and is studying them. In early 2010, Cooper and his
colleagues captured four Golden Eagles here and outfitted them with GPS
transmitters. All four headed north by mid-April and then spent the breeding
season on the Ungava Peninsula in northern Quebec. Cooper gets back to
Cookeville every now and then and was there not long ago -- just a few miles
down the road from where the fledgling was picked up by TWRA. Cooper is one of
Katzner's important Golden Eagle guys. They recently spent time this early
summer in the western part of the country with Cooper climbing to many Golden
Eagle nests. He can smell the air and tell you the age of a fledgling.
-- Katzner-type satellite tracking units probably will cost only about
$2,500 at the present. Surely, all of these excellent biologists who feed at
the trough of many hundreds of thousands if not a combined million dollars
worth of research have responded to TWRA about how and where to fetch one on
the spur of the moment. If this fledgling Golden Eagle does not make it more
than a few days back in the wild, then there is a good opportunity to get the
unit back and cash it in to whomever sold it to TWRA --but all of that has
probably been thought thru very carefully. Even what computer system could be
used to download the tracking of this bird. We'll probably learn that TWRA
plans do that in downtown Nashville.
-- hopefully, down the road, we will learn that Virginia can help
Tennessee learn how to quickly get going with Golden Eagle trapping during the
winter if we then know where eagles can be found. Of course that is depending
on how much time guys like Cooper can spare while working at goal of trapping
and putting transmitters on 90 Bald Eagles on a military base in eastern
Virginia starting this winter.
Perhaps the Tennessee Ornithological Society has been asked for emergency
approval to fund the transmitter for $2,500. It would be one of the good
things they do on a rainy day with a rainy day
bank account surplus.
Just can't wait......
Wallace Coffey
Bristol, TN
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