Nature Notes: The Eagle Is Rising
One of our smallest amphibians, the spring peeper, a tree frog that breeds in late March and April, was singing in Hither Woods on Sunday, when the air temperature had reached almost 60 degrees, according to Michael Odestick and his wife, Kelly, who were out for a walk. On the same day, one of our largest birds, the bald eagle, was seen on Long Pond south of Sag Harbor by Ellen Stahl.
As the temperature dove down to near freezing the following day, it is unlikely that peepers will stay above ground and sing for the rest of January and all of February. But from all appearances, we’ll be able to see bald eagles flying around or roosting on any given day throughout the remainder of the winter.
As a boy growing up in Mattituck on the North Fork in the 1940s and ’50s with a great interest in birds, I never saw a bald eagle locally and never heard or read of one being observed. There were many ospreys, but nary an eagle.
When I came back to Long Island in 1974 after 15 years on the West Coast, I was even more interested in birds, but still, one almost never saw or heard of a bald eagle here. In 1974 Newsday carried a story of a local man having illegally shot an eagle in a Bridgehampton field. By then all eagles, ospreys, and hawks were protected by law. Indeed, the bald eagle, our national bird, was one of the first species to be given endangered status during the Nixon administration of the late 1960s and early 1970s after the Endangered Species Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.
In 1978 during the annual January waterfowl count, I saw an immature bald eagle at the edge of Georgica Pond with the late Chris McKeever, a lawyer-naturalist who lived in Water Mill. From then on an eagle or two was seen locally every two or three years, almost always in the late fall or winter. In the 1990s one visited the East Hampton Town landfill most winters and fed on gulls, rats, and carrion, but area-wide eagles were still very scarce and most Christmas bird counts held around Long Island didn’t record a single one.
Come the new millennium, eagles began to be seen every year, mostly in the winter, and one or two were recorded on bird counts across the North and South Forks. Then in December of 2008, an observer on the Montauk Count assigned to Gardiner’s Island thought she saw a nest that was much too big for an osprey’s. Could it be an eagle’s nest? From that moment on, birders and wildlife specialists were on the lookout for breeding eagles across Long Island. They were already well establishing in New York State, say, along the Hudson River, by that time; why not here on Long Island, as well?
Two years later this same woman was back doing the count on Gardiner’sIsland. The nest was larger and two eagles were hanging around it. She had almost confirmed the first re-nesting of the bald eagle on Long Island since a pair last nested there in 1936. At least 72 years had elapsed between nestings.
Then we learned that a pair of eagles was not only nesting on Gardiner’s Island again in 2013, but were joined by a nesting pair on the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island. Then a third nest popped up in 2014, where she worked as a ranger on the William Floyd Estate in part of the Fire Island National Seashore complex located in Mastic Beach. There may be even more bald eagle nests on Long Island that we have yet to discover.
At any rate, the Endangered Species Act worked; the bald eagle’s status was upgraded to merely “threatened” in 1995 and then to a species of “special concern” in 2007. Yes, the bald eagle is back, and eastern Long Island is only the tip of an expanding iceberg.
If the eagles generally fledge two young every year here, one would think that they would be more visible in the off-season than in previous years. That is precisely the case. The most recent Long Island Christmas bird counts produced a record number of bald eagles. To begin with, on Jan. 2, as part of the Orient count, our mystery observer, Mary Laura Lamont, and her husband Eric Lamont, botanists, observed three — an adult and two immature eagles — while on Jessup’s Neck in the Morton Wildlife Refuge, and a fourth off North Haven, which joined the first three as they flew to the north end of North Haven.
On the same day, Arthur Goldberg and I counted two immature eagles in their territory east of Sag Harbor. They flew from the tip of Cedar Point in the county park over to Mashomack. That makes six between the four of us and the final results have yet to be compiled. On the weekend of the Montauk count, Dec. 15 and 16, Terry Sullivan was covering Fresh Pond on the Water Mill-to-East Hampton Village portion of the count when an immature flew over his head at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
Last Friday, Terry’s friend, Greg Boeklin, who is keeping track of eagles and photographing them, got a picture of an immature bald eagle in a tree being mobbed by crows at the edge of Otter Pond in Sag Harbor. On the next day, Ellen Stahl and her husband, Brian Boyhan, saw those two bald eagles on Long Pond, and then there was the one last Sunday.
What does this resurgence in local eagles mean? Well, eagles feed chiefly on fish, but also on carrion, as vultures do. They also take other birds and mammals, including baby deer. They are notorious for stealing food from other animals, especially from birds such as ospreys with fish in their talons. Between the eagles and the soon-to-be coywolves, wolf-coyote hybrids that are on the rise in the eastern United States, we may get back to deer population that is normal for Long Island without resorting to running down and de-ovarying does or selectively shooting does and fawns.
And should you be carrying one of those cute little fuzzy pooches that the femme fatales like to clutch to their bosom, don’t put it down unless you’re safely indoors.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].