Golden Eagle Redux

After release, the golden eagle landed briefly in a white pine before resuming its journey south (photo by Dave Bonta)

In case you’ve been wondering about the photo of me in the sidebar, here’s the story, from my November column in Pennsylvania Game News.

The phone rang just as we were in the midst of eating dinner.

“I’ll bet that’s Trish and she’s got an eagle,” I said.

Bruce answered the phone.

“You’ve got an eagle,” he repeated.  “You’ve got a problem. What is it?  Steve and Dave are here too.  I’ll send them both up.”

So began an adventure that had eluded us the previous autumn (see Golden Eagle Days, Part 1 and Part 2).

It was the last day of daylight saving time, and at 6:15, the sun had already set.  Trish Miller, a golden eagle researcher working on her Ph.D. at Penn State, had arrived at the new trapping site on our mountain in the morning.  Luckily, she had come by herself, because I had often encountered her with her little daughter Phoebe on her back heading to the site.

Unlike the previous year’s site, this one was a steep climb up Sapsucker Ridge and then a precarious climb down into the middle of a rock slide where her husband, Mike Lanzone, assisted by interns from the Powdermill Nature Reserve, had designed and built a blind and live trap.

During their first trapping season here, they had discovered that the golden eagles, after crossing the Tyrone Gap in Bald Eagle Mountain, would drop below the ridge on the northwestern side and not soar above it until they reached the top of First Field.  On the rock slide, the eagles often flew past at eye level.

Golden eagles are capable of taking very large prey. Dr. Katzner shows us why (D. Bonta)

The day she called us, the northwest wind had picked up at noon, and Miller had watched nine golden eagles fly over.  Every eagle was escorted through his territory by the resident red-tailed hawk, which picked them up on the far side of the gap, near a cell phone tower, and accompanied them on along the ridge.

Then the tenth golden eagle struck the bait.  One of the lines to the bait broke, and the eagle hung on to it while flapping half off the trapping platform.  Afraid to spring the bow net, Miller waited, hoping the eagle would flap back on to the platform. When it did, she sprang the net and had a perfect catch.  She managed to get the eagle into a large carrying case she had brought along, but she couldn’t haul it up the rock slide and down the trail to our place, a good half-mile away, before dark.  That’s where our sons came in.

Bruce and I waited and waited.  It grew dark and still we waited.  Finally, in they came, our two sons and Miller, bearing the eagle in the carrying case.  After giving us a chance to look in and see the magnificent bird, they carried the case down to our cellar and covered it with a sheet for the night to keep the bird calm.

Phoebe seemed especially entranced by the big eagle (D. Bonta)

The following morning researchers and bystanders began assembling to work and watch by 8:00 a.m.  It was a cold, damp and overcast 37-degree Sunday morning.  Dr. Todd Katzner, Director of Conservation and Field Research at The National Aviary, arrived from Pittsburgh first.  The Scott family, who had been packing up from a day of hunting when they brought the eagle down off the ridge, was also here, as well as our sons.

Before the other researchers arrived, Katzner carried the case into our shed.  He carefully opened it and climbed halfway inside the case to grab the feet of the eagle and pull it out.

“I think this a first year female,” he said and gave us a lesson on golden eagle biology.  He spread her tail to show the white on it and her more than five-foot wingspan to display the white underneath.  Both were signs of her age.  But her massive golden head was already its golden adult color.  Although her beak looked dangerous, it was her taloned feet that were.  She had been hatched sometime last April or May in northern Quebec or Labrador, he thought.

Miller, Lanzone, their children Jeffrey, Ashley and Phoebe arrived at 8:30, followed by Dan Ombalski, another researcher, from State College.

Todd Katzner and Trish Miller take measurements (Bruce Bonta)

Once everyone was assembled on our veranda, the work began.  They put a cap over the eagle’s head so she wouldn’t be too stressed, although Katzner told us that her cortisone level was high.

They measured her wings and tail and brought out a chart to check sizes against what would determine the sex of the bird.  Her legs were thick; her bright yellow talons huge.  “Fresh, happy feet,” Miller called them.

She weighed 41.20 grams or 8.4 pounds, which definitely made her the bigger, heavier female–the first female eastern golden eagle ever radio tagged.

It took hours to fit the harness and radio transmitter over her abundant feathers and impressive breast, and they shook her several times so she would flap wildly.  Then they would once again adjust the harness.  They sewed a section on with thread so that the transmitter would fall off in a year or two.  All of this was part of a new kind of transmitter, and Lanzone had been up all night tweaking it, perfectionist that he is.  Instead of transmitting data once an hour, as the other transmitters did the previous year, this one was made to transmit every thirty seconds.

Finally, all the actors were ready. That was when the researchers decided that the eagle would be released on the rock slide where she had been trapped, so she would resume her migration with as little disruption as possible.

Mike and Trish make adjustments to the transmitter, with assistance from Steve (B. Bonta)

All of us hiked to the site except for Katzner who drove The National Aviary truck that held the golden eagle in the carrying case.  By then three Powdermill interns had joined us as well.  What a crowd to usher off an eagle.

I picked my way down the rock slide to the first open area where they planned the release.  Everyone had cameras and surrounded the eagle and Lanzone who was holding her.

At that moment, Miller came over to me and said that they would like me to release her.  It had never crossed my mind that they would honor me in such a way.  Looking at her talons, I gulped and agreed.  How could I turn down a chance to hold this incredible bird?

Miller showed me how to grasp her feet and then carefully transferred the eagle to me.  Her eight pounds seemed light despite her massive size.

I held her for what seemed many photos and videos.

“Just throw her lightly into the air,” they told me.  When I yelled “Ready,” Katzner responded “Go!” And just as we had rehearsed — off she flew.  I felt as if I was releasing air.

But instead of streaking away, she flew into a nearby pine tree.  Our son Dave and Lanzone ran through the underbrush to take more photos and watch her as she ruffled and smoothed her feathers, grooming off the feel of humans who had insulted her dignity.  Once she reached behind her back and pulled repeatedly at the transmitter. There were a few tense moments until she gave up trying to remove it and went back to grooming.

Then she rose into the air again, and instead of continuing down the ridge, she returned to circle above us twice, as if in farewell, before she headed south to our collective applause. We wished her a safe trip and hoped all would go well with the transmitter so we could watch “our” eagle’s journey.

But months dragged on and we didn’t hear anything.  I finally contacted the researchers and learned from Katzner that “the prototype transmitter had worked very well and provided initial data for a few days before it failed” and they had lost track of her.  What a disappointment!

Everybody wanted to touch this talisman of wilderness (D. Bonta)

But Miller told me that they had learned more, during that short time, about how she used the ridge during her flight, than they had from the other eagles they had tagged with transmitters the previous year.  Because their research project goal is, in Katzner’s words, “to provide informed science and generate key information so that raptor friendly wind farms can be built in Pennsylvania,” they must know how high eagles fly above the ridges.

Nothing in the evolutionary history of birds or bats has prepared them for industrial-sized wind mills, what some folks call “eggbeaters in the sky.”  Each 150 foot blade, 300 feet in diameter, weighs 9 tons and the blade tips move 200 feet per second, Katzner says.

The researchers also must identify primary migrating routes and wintering sites and identify the eagles’ behavior on migration and during the winter.  Eventually they plan to produce maps that show the relative risk to the birds from the development of industrial wind farms.

All of this scientific information was impressive, but we couldn’t help wondering about our own golden eagle.  What had happened to her?  Where had she gone?

Then, on Valentine’s Day, we received an e-mail from Lanzone.

“Got a call today from someone helping with a PGC study about an eagle that looked like the one in the Game News.  Turns out it was the golden eagle you released.  It looks very healthy from the pictures and has been visiting the deer [dump] for just over two weeks (they had thought it was a bald eagle until the other day)…it is visiting their study area on private land just north of Greensburg in Westmoreland County about 25 miles from my office.”

They hoped to re-trap her and put on a new transmitter, but she was having none of that.  Once trapped, twice shy. But what a relief it was to learn that she was fine and that she hadn’t even left Pennsylvania.  And she wasn’t the only golden eagle to winter in our state.  At other deer dumps in other parts of the state stationary cameras captured photos of golden eagles feeding on deer carcasses.

The white on the underside of the wings is one of the things that distinguishes a juvenile golden eagle from an adult (D. Bonta)

There is much more to learn about eastern golden eagles.  Katzner estimates that from 1000 to 1500 golden eagles pass through Pennsylvania during migration, which is 90 to 95% of the population.  So far, it seems as if in the autumn most pre-adults migrate through eastern Pennsylvania along Hawk Mountain (the easternmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province) and adults through western Pennsylvania, primarily along the Allegheny Front and our own Bald Eagle Ridge, the westernmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province.  Southern West Virginia appears to provide key wintering habitat.

In spring, adults migrate mostly from the Allegheny Front to about 60 miles east, although Tussey Mountain, the next ridge to the east of Bald Eagle, seems to be the major ridge.  There is also evidence that some pre-adults stay in Virginia for the summer.

With the help of Quebec collaborators, they now have radio transmitters on 15 eastern golden eagles.  Using GPS satellite telemetry, which is solar powered and should last one to three years, GPS data points at regular intervals are transmitted to a server by satellite. And those points should give them all the information they need about the eastern golden eagles’ flight speed, elevation, and timing during migration.

As Miller continues her “Wind Power and Eagle Migration” Ph.D. work, we hope she traps and radio tags many more golden eagles on our mountaintop and on the Allegheny Front so we can learn more about the life history of this distinct, poorly-known, small population of eastern golden eagles.

The eagle seconds after release, with the Allegheny Front in the distance (B. Bonta)

In Search of Nature

John James Audubon portrait by John Syme, 1826

“It’s too darned hot,” I said on our 45th wedding anniversary. The temperature was heading into the high, humid nineties so we shelved our plan to take a hike.

Instead, we followed Plan B and on a late August morning, my husband Bruce and I drove to the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in Millersburg, along the eastern side of the Susquehanna River. Named in honor of Millersburg resident, wildlife artist, naturalist and writer Ned Smith, the Center was founded in 1993 “to merge the arts and the natural world and foster a celebration of both,” according to their mission statement.

We were eager to see what was billed as “the largest exhibition of John James Audubon’s artwork ever to appear in central Pennsylvania.”  As someone who has written extensively about the history of natural history, especially in Pennsylvania, I was curious to see what material had been included in an exhibition at their new Olewine Gallery entitled “The Mysterious John James Audubon.”

Years ago, I had visited John James Audubon’s first home in America called “Mill Grove,” “a home,” his granddaughter Maria wrote, “He always loved and never spoke of without deep feeling.” His French father, who owned the property, sent Audubon there to escape the Napoleonic Wars.

Located in eastern Pennsylvania along the Upper Perkiomen Creek in Montgomery County, it was there that Audubon began what he called his “simple and agreeable studies” of birds, learning to draw them from nature by shooting and then immediately mounting them on blocks of wood with the help of wires that held them up in lifelike positions.  As part of his work, he banded the first birds in North America by tying silver threads around the legs of eastern phoebes nesting in a rock cave along the Perkiomen and was delighted when they returned the following year.

Mill Grove farm c. 1820 (painting by Thomas Birch)

He lived at Mill Grove a scant three years from 1804 until 1807, but in that time he met his future wife, a neighboring woman named Lucy Bakewell and began his lifelong love affair with the birds of North America. Because his wife’s family continued to live along the Perkiomen, Audubon often returned to Pennsylvania to visit.

Built of Pennsylvania fieldstone, the farmhouse was and still is a treasure house of Audubon’s paintings. Now leased by the National Audubon Society from Montgomery County, which purchased the house and grounds back in 1951, it has been renamed the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove.  Several of Audubon’s paintings at Mill Grove were lent to the Ned Smith Center for display, including the massive oil painting “The Eagle and the Lamb,” painted in 1828 when he was in England.  So too were all four volumes of his massive Birds of North America.

I was especially interested in paintings he had done based on his research and travels in Pennsylvania.  One was Vigor’s vireo, named for British naturalist Nicholas Vigors, which he had collected at Mill Grove and painted several decades later.  But as it does for many birdwatchers today, the immature plumage of a pine warbler that he had previously painted in mature plumage had confused him.  In May 1808, he collected two male chestnut-sided warblers near Pottstown and later painted them on moth mullein.  Another bird he purportedly painted in Pennsylvania in 1824 was one of his favorites — our state bird the “ruffed grous.”

Audubon's "Ruffed Grous" from Birds of North America

But he made his largest collecting trip in Pennsylvania in the late summer and early autumn of 1829 when he spent six weeks in what he called the “Great Pine Forest — Swamp it cannot be called” of the Upper Lehigh River “where I made many a drawing.”  He lived in the home of logger Jediah Irish and his family and ate “juicy venison, excellent bear flesh and delightful trout.”  However, he was distressed to see that “Trees, one after another, were… constantly heard falling during the days, and in calm nights, the greedy mills told the sad tale that in a century the noble forests around should exist no more.”  Nevertheless, he painted more than 90 birds for his Birds of North America because of his trip including the red-breasted nuthatch, pileated woodpecker in a wild grape tangle, and common ravens.

Near the end of his life, his focus turned to mammals and he produced, with the help of his sons and friends, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Several prints from that collection hung on the walls of the Olewine Gallery including “Pennant’s marten,” which we call the fisher.  The painting portrays a live fisher that had been captured on nearby Peter’s Mountain in Dauphin County and sent to Audubon by 21-year-old Spencer Fullerton Baird, a protégé of Audubon.

Audubon's "Pennant's marten" (A.K.A. fisher)

“It seems in very good health,” Audubon wrote, “and is without exception the most unmitigatedly savage beast I ever saw…”

Most people have heard of John James Audubon.  Fewer know of or remember Spencer Fullerton Baird.  Yet he was one of several well-known Pennsylvania naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Born in Reading in 1823, his widowed mother moved her seven children to Carlisle, where she had family, when Baird was ten years old. Baird and his older brother William roamed the Cumberland Valley and, in 1838, Baird began a journal in which he listed various birds and recorded the weather.

The following year he corresponded with Audubon. “You see sir, I have taken (after much hesitation) the liberty of writing to you.  I am but a boy, and very inexperienced, as you no doubt will observe from my description of the Flycatcher.”  The flycatcher turned out to be one of two flycatchers discovered by Baird — the yellow-bellied and least flycatchers.

Audubon responded enthusiastically, writing “Although you speak of yourself as being a youth, your style and the descriptions you have sent me prove to me that an old head may from time to time be found on young shoulders.”  Perhaps, Audubon was reminded of the lament he wrote after his time in the Lehigh River area when he wondered why young men didn’t “occupy themselves in contemplating the rich profusion which nature has poured around them…But, alas, no! They are none of them aware of the richness of the Great Pine Swamp…” In Baird, he had found his “dear young friend” and as “a young naturalist of eminent attainments,” as Audubon described him in The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, Baird began collecting specimens for the book, sending Audubon a “common American wildcat” or bobcat he had shot a mile and a quarter from Carlisle that was two-and-a-half-feet long and weighed twelve-and-a-half pounds.

Bear Meadows Natural Area (photo by lemonad)

But Baird also made his own collection of birds and mammals mostly on foot. In June 1842, he took a marathon walking trip along the Susquehanna Valley and stayed with various families along the way.  He began by walking from Carlisle to Mifflin, then on to Lewistown and Stone Valley in Huntingdon County.  From there he “Went over to Bear Meadows [now a state natural area in Rothrock State Forest] 9 miles off, being a meadow on top of a Mountain so Boggy that you can thrust a stick through the roots and moss 15 feet.  The place is filled in most places with a dense growth of Rhododendron, Hemlock, Black Spruce, Tamarack, etc.  It contains many very curious and beautiful flowers,” which is still an apt description of the place today.

Continuing his walk, Baird visited the Andrew Curtins (of iron furnace fame) in Bellefonte where he saw a pair of Bewick’s wrens (now gone from Pennsylvania). Then he walked back to the Susquehanna River where he crossed over to Northumberland to visit Joseph Priestley “whom I found very clever.”  On he went to see a coal mine in Wilkes Barre and then back to Northumberland. From there he walked home in one day covering 60 miles in 15 hours.

“Lost 12 pounds of flesh, and burnt to the color of old Aunt Rachel. Walked in a Blouse Check shirt, Beaverteen Pants, Heavy shoes and cap. Carried Knapsack and Gun,” he wrote to his brother William. In all he walked 2100 miles that year.

Spencer Fullerton Baird, c. 1850

A graduate of Dickinson College, he received a full professorship in natural history there in 1846. He introduced for the first time in America field excursions to his zoology and botany classes. Known affectionately as “The Prof” by his students, he continued his collecting and moved his collections from his mother’s overflowing shed to Dickinson College.

Then, in 1850, he was elected Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution to its first Secretary Joseph Henry. He filled two freight cars with his collections and shipped them to the Smithsonian. As Assistant Secretary, he encouraged any and all explorers and expeditions through prior training and prodigious letter-writing to bring back specimens for the Smithsonian. He also obtained funding from the government to build the United States National Museum to display the collections.

In the next 37 years of his life, he published over 1000 papers and books including Mammals of America and the Birds of North America. He added hundreds of new species to every branch of natural science, for instance, he increased the known number of mammals by 25% as he classified the material shipped to him from all over the country.

He started the United States Fish Commission in 1871 in response to enquiries about the decline of fish along the eastern coast of North America. Later he was named fish culturist of the world by the Germans and his research led to the eventual establishment of research facilities at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. Like Pennsylvania native Rachel Carson, who later studied at Wood’s Hole, Baird seemed to be fond of the ocean.

In 1878, Joseph Henry died and Baird became the Second Secretary of the Smithsonian and retained the title of Fish Commissioner. But after nine years at the helm of the Smithsonian, he resigned and died two months later at Wood’s Hole.

Modest, kind, gentle and sympathetic, the boy naturalist from Pennsylvania had become one of the most renowned scientists of the nineteenth century. As one biologist later wrote, “He had made the hills and streams of Pennsylvania his laboratory and he walked with Audubon.”

Joseph Priestley House (photo by Bruce Bonta)

Like Baird, we finished our day by driving (instead of walking) up the winding, scenic highway along the eastern side of the Susquehanna River to Northumberland to visit the well-preserved home of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley. In 1799 Priestley, a Unitarian minister from England credited with the discovery of oxygen, fled to America to escape prosecution for his theological and political views. There he isolated carbon monoxide in his Northumberland home before dying in 1804. No doubt, Baird had visited his grandson, also named Joseph, during his monumental walking tour.

Although the homes of the Englishman Priestley and Frenchman Audubon, neither of whom lived very long in Pennsylvania, are well-preserved and open to the public, no such monument exists for Spencer Fullerton Baird in his home state.  But every time I visit the Smithsonian, I am reminded of Spencer Fullerton Baird and his selfless life devoted to the discovery and study of North America’s natural heritage.
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For further information:  Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art, 176 Water Company Rd. P.O. Box 33, Millersburg, PA 17061, (717) 692-3699 or e-mail nedsmith [at] epix [dot] net.

John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, 1201 Pawlings Road, Audubon, PA 19403, (610) 666-5593.

Joseph Priestley House, 472 Priestley Avenue, Northumberland, Pa 17857, (570) 473-9474. Their e-mail is mbashore [at] state [dot] pa [dot] us.

All three places are open to the public and have special programs for adults and children.

Thanks to lemonad (Jonas Nockert) for licencing his photo with a Creative Commons licence. (See all the photos in his Rothrock State Forest set.)

Polecat

This is the time of year when essence of skunk sometimes reaches my nostrils as I wander over our mountain. That’s because March is prime mating season, and male striped skunks are abroad looking for receptive females.

The females are still holed up in their communal winter dens six feet underground, and sometimes one lucky male has spent the winter with as many as 11 females. In fact, a Pennsylvania den holds the all time record of 18 females.

“He secures rights to this harem,” says Luanne Johnson, who has been studying the striped skunks of Martha’s Vineyard since 2004.

Most males, though, den alone and must go from den to den in search of mates. A female skunk is in heat for only four or five days and those that live alone usually mate with several males. If she is already pregnant, she fights off other males, and she raises her young by herself. Although mating can occur any time between mid-February and mid-April, mid-March is the optimum time in Pennsylvania.

In 63 days, more or less, a female striped skunk will have a litter of 2 to 10 young in a den she has either dug herself with her long-clawed forefeet or in an abandoned woodchuck or fox den she has refurbished. The den can be from 6 to 25 feet long and has one to three chambers 12 to 15 inches in diameter lined with dried leaves and grasses.

Although the pups are born blind, helpless, and hairless, their distinctive black and white pattern is already evident beneath their skins. Even before they can see-on average at 22 days of age-they can emit scent. They are weaned when they are six to eight weeks old and follow their mother single file on her nightly hunting forays. By late summer some disperse, but others stay with their mother until the following spring when they can mate.

The striped skunk, Mephitis mephitis, lives in southern Canada from Nova Scotia to British Columbia including the Hudson Bay area, south to Florida, west to California, and into northern Mexico, excluding only corners of the southwest desert where water is scarce. Pennsylvania’s south-central counties of Bedford, Fulton, and Franklin also have a small population of the eastern spotted skunk, Spilogale putorius, but, by and large, the striped skunk, also called “lined skunk,” “polecat,” or “wood pussy” is the common skunk species in Pennsylvania.

Recently, based on DNA studies by Dr. Jerry Dragoo of the University of New Mexico, skunks have been removed from the weasel family Mustelid and placed into its own family Mephitidae, which means “noxious odor,” and includes the nine New World skunk species and two Southeast Asia stink badger species.

Dragoo, affectionately referred to as “Skunk Man,” has little or no sense of smell, so as a mephitologist he can easily study and live with skunks. When he wants one for his research, he chases it down, picks it up by its tail, and is liberally sprayed, because, as skunk expert Richard G. Van Gelder discovered back in the 1960s, you can only grab a skunk by the tail and escape being sprayed if you surprise the animal. Otherwise, it is able to evert its anus and expose the nipples from its huge and squishy scent sacs, which are then ready to fire even if you do pick it up by its tail. Dragoo explains on his website, Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations, that the spray is either “emitted as an atomized cloud,” which he calls the “’shotgun’ approach,” or “as a stream directed at the predator’s face…the ‘.357 magnum’ tactic,” with a range of 10 to 15 feet.

But Dragoo, Luanne Johnson, and Travis Quirk, who is studying striped skunks near Manitoba’s Delta Marsh, agree that skunks are timid animals that would rather run and hide than unleash their ultimate weapon. And a skunk will give plenty of warning-stomping its front feet, arching its tail, chattering its teeth, and shuffling backwards– before facing a predator, rapidly twisting its rear end around, and letting loose.

What it lets loose is a barrage of sulphur compounds called thiols, which cling to the victim and continue to release more bad smells as they slowly react with water from the victim’s body over several days. William Wood, a chemist from Humboldt State University in California, studied skunk “perfume” in 1990 and found that previous analyses of it had missed a couple compounds and misidentified two others. In addition, Wood added three new components and a previously unknown chemical to the mix. Best of all, he devised a way to change the chemistry of the spray and render it odorless. Forget tomato juice. It doesn’t work. Instead, mix one quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide, a half cup of baking soda, and a tablespoon of liquid dish soap and apply it to the victim, he advises. Quirt and Johnson say it works.

Photo by fieldsbh (Creative Commons)

Both of them are studying the eating habits of striped skunks. In addition to the bad rap they get about their smell, skunks are also accused of eating birds’ eggs and chicks. Quirk is concerned primarily with waterfowl losses due to skunks and Johnson with endangered and threatened shorebirds, specifically piping plovers, least terns, and American oystercatchers. But the researchers agree that omnivorous skunks don’t intentionally target birds’ eggs and chicks.

“They don’t seem to go out and hunt them methodically. They’re just ambling down the beach, and they bump into them and then they’ll eat whatever’s in front of them,” Johnson says.

She adds that neither she nor her field assistants have ever seen a striped skunk kill a chick. Since she has ear-tagged 120 skunks and put radio transmitting collars on 49, which she has continually tracked on their nightly rounds, she should know.

Striped skunks, which find food by using their keen sense of smell and hearing, eat just about anything including garbage and carrion. That’s why they thrive in a wide variety of habitats, including lawns and golf courses where they dig up grubs. But they prefer forest edges, old fields, and brushy farmlands where they do more good than harm, eating an incredible diversity of insects such as beetles, crickets, moths, ants, and grasshoppers, and specializing in such harmful to agriculture insects as bud worms, June beetles, army worms, cut worms, and scarab beetles. They dig up yellow jacket nests and scratch on beehives to entice honeybees outside so they can eat them and are seemingly unperturbed by their stings. They also relish spiders, toads, frogs, snakes, young rabbits, chipmunks, shrews, voles, salamanders, crayfish and earthworms.

Striped skunks roll caterpillars on the ground , especially those of the gypsy moth and other hairy or spiny species before they eat them. They do the same with toads. And when they do stumble on the eggs of ground-nesting birds, they roll them between their hind legs until they break on a rock or other hard object.

“They are accomplished mousers,” Johnson says. “If they find them, they will run them down.”

They also like an array of plant food — blueberries, wild grapes, blackberries, black cherries, raspberries, Virginia creeper, poison ivy and nightshade berries, grasses, nuts, roots, grains, and, at our place in late winter, spilled bird seed.

Striped skunks fatten up before winter and sleep through the coldest weather. But their body temperature only drops from 98 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and they frequently appear during warm spells. Nevertheless, from November to March, females lose from 32 to 55 percent of their weight and males from 15 to 48 percent. In the winter of 2006, Johnson make an unusual discovery while tracking a yearling male. She found him sharing ” the hollowed out base of an old beech tree with a raccoon for several days…I got the signal on my skunk from the spot, but a little raccoon face was staring out at me. ‘Any port in a storm’ as one of my sailing friends likes to say,” she told me.

Photo by cruadinx (Creative Commons)

During the summer striped skunks without young often sleep in different spots every night, according to Johnson, such as underneath shrubs, old boats and decks.

“They’re moving around a lot,” she told a reporter for the Martha Vineyard Times, “and a lot of places kind of function as little skunk motels, where skunks will come and go.”

And that’s when they get into trouble with humans because they will sometimes den under outbuildings or homes. Dragoo, the Skunk Man, spends a lot of time relocating such skunks between May and September. Although they rarely release their scent in their dens, he says, it remains in their feces even after they are removed from an inappropriate place.

Great horned owls and barred owls aren’t bothered by skunk musk and are major predators on striped skunks. Eagles, crows, vultures, coyotes, and bobcats also kill them. But automobiles are their biggest killer along with a wide variety of parasites. They are also major carriers of at least two rabies’ variants. For this reason they don’t make good pets.

But they do make excellent study subjects even though they are nocturnal and the researchers must track them at night. That’s how Quirk became a mephitologist. Another researcher refused to work on skunks because nighttime field work made her claustrophobic so Quirk volunteered instead.

“I’m so sleep-deprived,” Johnson says.

It’s worth it though. She constantly makes new discoveries, for instance, that striped skunks travel farther in one night than researchers suspected. A nursing female she tracked made a full three-and-a half mile round trip in her nightly search for food.

Unlike many researchers, Johnson names her skunks because it makes it easier for her to remember them and because she has found that they have different personalities. One is a snoozer; another is wary, but all of them are cute. Quirk, who raised orphan skunks, calls them “sweethearts.”

And Dragoo? Seven research skunks live at his place. Charlie, Bugbane, Stinky Pete, and Rosebud live outside and Siren, Shadow, and OnRey live inside. None of them have had their scent glands removed. One writer, Mark Wheller, who visited Dragoo, was initially wary of them. But he was won over when he was near Dragoo’s inside skunks.

“Close up, skunks are about as cute as animals get,” he wrote, “right up there with raccoons and bunnies.”
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Sketches by Louis Agassiz Fuertes (public domain)

Web-only bonus: Here’s a short video Dave shot of a skunk foraging in the picnic area at Canoe Creek State Park on March 13, 2008.

Flying Monkeys

Crows acting up, by Greg7

“Why don’t you just shoot them?”

That’s the reaction of most homeowners when Grant Stokke asks permission to live trap American crows in their backyards. But he hastens to add that they do give him permission.

Stokke is a graduate student who is working with Dr. Margaret Brittingham, professor of wildlife resources at Penn State University, to try to understand the dynamics of winter crow roosts in Pennsylvania, specifically one in and around the city of Lancaster.

I joined Brittingham, Stokke, and field assistant David Burkett for a day of crow field work last January after reading about attempts the winter before to chase the birds from their winter roost in suburban Lancaster County. That winter three townships had called in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services to set out poison bait, which didn’t work very well and angered citizens who opposed using a toxic chemical to kill crows.

Lancaster isn’t the only mid-sized city adjacent to agricultural fields that supports winter crow roosts. Harrisburg, Bethlehem, Scranton, and most recently Lebanon, have a similar problem. So too do a host of other places from Auburn, New York to Riverton, Wyoming.

Most places have tried a combination of noisemakers, shooting, distress calls, and other harassment techniques such as hanging dead crows from trees at their roost site as Lancaster County did the previous winter to chase them away. Sometimes the crows leave, but usually they return.

After all, crows have always formed winter roosts. They used to be in the country, but now that we have provided well-lit malls and city streets that keep away crow predators, specifically their nemesis — the great horned owl — and which are close to agricultural areas that provide food during the day, crows spend the long, dark, winter nights close to humans. Unfortunately, they are not only noisy but incredibly messy, covering buildings, sidewalks, and cars with their excrement.

In the Lancaster area, the crows begin arriving the second week of November and build up their numbers in December. To find out where they are coming from, Stokke and Brittingham have collected stray feathers from American crows, which they subjected to hydrogen ion testing. The test indicated that those crows were in Canada when they grew their feathers, proving that winter roosts consist mostly of migrant crows.

Kevin McGowan, who has been studying American crows in and around Ithaca, New York, since 1988, writes that several of the birds he has tagged there, “have been shot or seen in Pennsylvania during the winter,” so at least a few of the crows come from New York state.

Furthermore, Stokke and Brittingham have discovered that about 25 to 35% of the local crows will occasionally join the roost.

“They will roost at the communal roost some nights and within their family home range the rest of the time. The other 70 to 75% roost within the family home range all the time,” Brittingham said. This finding directly contradicts McGowan’s research in Ithaca in which he found that winter roosts there are made up of migrants and locals and that all locals join the roost.

“I don’t know why there is a difference with Ithaca,” Brittingham said.

“There Is A Light,” by CrowHand

But knowing where they come from doesn’t solve the problem. That’s why Stokke and Brittingham, in their crow behavior study — “Ecology and Management of Urban Crows in Pennsylvania” — are working with local citizens’ groups, local, state and federal government officials, and colleagues at Franklin and Marshall College “to develop a multifaceted approach to reducing the crow problem,” Brittingham said. “But,” she added, “there’s got to be some place for them to go.” Ultimately, Stokke said, they are “looking at whether we might create a place to attract these crows where they won’t be so much of a problem.”

Last winter, instead of poisoning crows, USDA Wildlife Services trained citizens in a variety of harassment techniques including shooting blanks at the birds. First, this harassment moved them from a suburban area northwest of Lancaster, which includes the Park City Mall, where the crows roosted on their 10-acre roof and pecked holes in it. They also made a mess of cars in the parking lot.

Then the crows congregated in center city Lancaster for two weeks. That, Stokke told us, was a rough neighborhood, but still the citizens continued their harassment.

The plan was to move the crows to a county park southwest of Lancaster. It was ideal crow habitat, they thought, but the crows didn’t agree. Instead, they circled and returned to the original northwest light industrial area near farm fields, and that’s where Brittingham and I met up with Stokke and Burkett.

They had already done their pre-dawn roost count, which they estimated to consist of 30 to 35,000 crows. Of those, ten to 20% are the smaller fish crows and the rest are American crows. So far they don’t know where the fish crows are coming from, although Brittingham said that, “Wildlife Services banded a lot of fish crows so we may eventually figure that out.”

Stokke and Burkett also drive a daily route to see where the 42 radio-tagged American crows, half of which are locals and half migrants, spend their days. They took us along for a portion of their route. At the edge of a field across from a housing development, the radio buzzed as we approached an American crow with a white antenna affixed to its back.

“That’s the first one I trapped,” Stokke said. He discovered that this local American crow family of nine or ten birds has less than a square mile of territory. They rarely leave it, although at least two crows did join the Lancaster roost for one night. Such information is hard won, because trapping American crows is not easy, as we found out.

Crows eating French fries, by Greg7

The bait that day was ground beef and peanuts in the shell, but usually it is hot dogs and Chitos, which are cheaper, Stokke told us. At the edge of a corn field, they spent many minutes setting up a portable trap designed by USDA’s Wildlife Services and then carefully camouflaging it with dried grasses. We retreated to their sport utility vehicle and waited for an hour.”All it takes is one brave crow and the rest are in,” Stokke said.

But not one crow came near the trap, not even a fish crow.

These smaller crows, Stokke explained, are easier to trap but they have to release them because the radio-tags are designed for the heavier American crows.

We moved on to a backyard across from a Barnes and Noble bookstore. Cars streamed past on nearby U.S. Route 30 and the Fruitville Pike. A line of tall trees divided the backyard from a corn field. Another copse of trees split the corn field, and it was there that the crows had congregated. We watched for an agonizingly long time as first one crow, then another, flew into the backyard trees for a look at the bait. Finally, one landed near the trap.

“One healthy bird, glossy feathers, lots of body fat,” Brittingham commented. She figured that it was too well-fed to be tempted by their bait. Usually it was a great place to trap crows, but the birds often outsmart them according to Stokke.

While we watched, the crows continued to fly over the bait, but no more birds stopped to look. I felt as frustrated as the researchers.

“They don’t look hungry,” Brittingham said.

By then the crows were engaged in what the scientists call PRA (pre-roosting aggregation) or staging in groups away from the roost, and everywhere we looked we could see flocks of crows calling and chasing.

“I think of them as flying monkeys,” Stokke said, “because they are so smart.” Other researchers agree that the crow family in general is incredibly intelligent. Carolee Caffrey, who studied American crows in Oklahoma, watched a male crow shape a piece of wood into a probe by pecking at its tapered end. He then stuck it into a fence post knot to extract a spider lurking just beyond the reach of his bill.

Caffrey also watched a female American crow defend her nest from a climbing researcher by breaking off pinecones and dropping them on the climber’s head. Altogether, she hit the researcher three out of four tries.

American crows are also the ultimate family-value birds. They mate for life, live in family groups, and older siblings often help feed and protect their younger brothers and sisters. Unlike most other wild creatures, adult American crows never chase away their offspring. When they do leave their family, they return frequently to visit. McGowan, in Ithaca, reported that “one individual (less than one year old) was seen at a compost pile in northern Pennsylvania with a flock of crows, and three weeks later it was back in Ithaca with its parents who were starting nesting. It helped the parents raise young that year, and remained in the area over subsequent winters.”

As the afternoon waned, crows flew more purposefully toward the roost area. In the distance we heard the “pop” of blanks being shot by citizens using nonlethal harassment techniques. The light industrial area hardly looked like a natural area. Under a single conifer surrounded by business buildings, Stokke spotted a banded dead crow. It was not one of their bands so he copied down the number and removed a tail feather for hydrogen ion testing. He also examined it for injuries and found none. The crow was stiff, covered with excrement, and had probably died on the roost the previous night.

The service manager for a nearby car dealer emerged from the back door, and when we told him what we were doing, he launched into his own crow woes. The crows had been using their roof for two weeks.

“We’re just not happy about it,” he said. “They hit a lot of new cars when they take off in the morning — “cars they have to wash before customers arrive.

Eventually, driving through a maze of linked roads behind business buildings, we reached the back of loading docks where we parked. On one side beyond the parking lot were a cattail-filled wetland, a line of tall trees, and the backs of substantial new homes. In front of us was a posted, chain link fence. Beyond that was a large grassy area and then a cement factory.

A crow roost in State College, Pennsylvania, by mandy whale

Standing behind the fence, we watched in awe as a glorious sunset lit the thousands of crows flying in from all directions. Many alighted on the flat-roofed buildings, cawing loudly. Others landed in the line of trees along the wetland, disturbing a large flock of Canada geese that joined the general hubbub and flushing a great blue heron.

What a spectacular, yet ludicrous sight. Stokke, who had previously studied common ravens in a remote area of Washington state, could not imagine a more stark contrast to his present situation — malls and business buildings, housing developments, and crushing traffic.

Yet nature persisted and, in fact, preferred the city/suburban landscape. In our rush to expand and develop we had created ideal winter habitat for the gregarious, intelligent crows. Safe from predators and warmed by the “heat bubble,” rising from the buildings which can be five to ten degrees higher than the surrounding countryside, the crows slowly settled down for the night.
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To learn how you can support local volunteers in Lancaster and protect the crows from lethal management, visit the website of the Lancaster County Crow Coalition.

All photos used by permission.