[Bristol-Birds] TWRA's enormous Golden Eagle opportunity
- From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Bristol-birds" <bristol-birds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 21:32:07 -0400
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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