Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013 - 54

eagle that had been on the bait from noon to 2 p.m. when she disturbed it. The photos were much better than the one from the talus slope, and we wondered if it was the same bird. Even though the ofﬁcial study ended the next day, Paula decided to keep all the carcasses out with her cameras as long as possible. She also notiﬁed Miller, but she was unable to come and try to live trap the eagle until the following week. Would the eagle stay around that long? On February 18 there were 198 more golden eagle photos on the spruce grove camera, but the last photos had been taken on February 17 and there were no more. A week later, on February 27, I saw a large bird ﬂap off the Far Field bait. I thought it was a golden eagle, and Paula later veriﬁed that it was and that it had been coming into the bait for four days. My last sighting of a golden eagle there was March 2, but by then golden eagle migration was in full swing. In fact, because it was such a warm winter, our golden eagles may have all been migrants and not wintering birds. In the meantime, Miller and Lanzone had been rushing all over the state telemetering birds at other bait sites. They managed to capture three males and three females. In Forbes State Forest, with the help of state forester Cory Wentzel, they captured the largest known bird in eastern North America, a second winter female and the only young bird they caught. The other ﬁve were adults, one each in Tuscarora and Rothrock state forests, the Allegheny National Forest, and two private sites near Emporium. The male they caught in Rothrock was a recovery that had been originally caught in 2000 by other researchers as a ﬁrst-year bird during fall migration. Miller and Katzner also exchange information with colleagues in Quebec province where most of our golden eagles go to nest. Most of the birds they telemetered in 2012 headed straight north toward northern Quebec and Labrador, one adult female took a trip around Quebec’s more southerly
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Gaspe Peninsula, and one male ended up on the south shore of the Hudson Bay in Ontario after a look around Manitoba. He was the ﬁrst bird in their project to go west to the Ontario breeding range. Late last summer my husband Bruce and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary by spending 15 days exploring the Gaspe Peninsula. We mostly followed the coast and saw numerous gray seals, ﬁn whales and, best of all, hundreds of thousands of common gannets at their nesting site on Bonaventure Island. But we didn’t see a golden eagle, not one, not even when we followed Dr. Katzner’s directions to a nest site above a mountain road. High up on a heavily forested ridge we spotted the nest site with our scope. Unfortunately, their nesting was over for the year. Still, we wondered how the Gaspe researchers had been able to ﬁnd that site and others in the rugged Gaspe interior. Miller admitted that even though they had been there during the nesting season, they never saw a golden eagle either. Junior Tremblay, one of the Gaspe researchers, told me that “some of our nests were found with helicopter survey, but most were found with the participation of local ornithologists who do huge work to scan many potential cliffs for the breeding eagles.” In a recent paper published by members of the recently formed Eastern Golden Eagle Working Group, the researchers have discovered that Quebec has the largest number of breeding eastern golden eagles at 300 to 500 breeding pairs, most of which nest above 50 degrees North. Those nests in the far north of Quebec are built on cliffs, on the edge of but avoiding heavily forested areas. Those on the Gaspe are mostly in trees in forested habitats. However, golden eagles on the Gaspe do forage in open landscapes created by disturbances and wetlands and feed extensively on birds, particularly waterfowl and wading birds. Birds that summer on the Gaspe mainly migrate through New England which, before the age of DDT, also had a breedGAME NEWS

Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013

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