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)

Golden Eagle Days (Part 2)

Continued from November.

photo by Todd Katzner

Then came the great change. After a mild, misty start on December first, the thermometer hit 65 degrees and then began to plummet as the wind picked up. The northwest winds had finally arrived a month late and with it, the following morning, came the eagle researchers. They had a third radio-tag and they meant to use it.

By 10:10 a.m., when I arrived in the blind, they had already counted 12 golden eagles. Behind me in the blind they had a red-tailed hawk in a can. On this bright, cold, windy day they expected visitors from Powdermill Nature Reserve, and they planned a banding demonstration of a red-tail in case they didn’t trap an eagle. That red-tail, Lanzone told me, was “one of the smallest I ever saw.” And then number 13 golden eagle flew past.

After that, there was a lull, but at 10:45 number 14 appeared. Lanzone played the bait even after the eagle flew out of sight.

“They could come in from behind the spruce grove,” Lanzone explained.

The guests arrived, including the head of the Powdermill Nature Reserve, Dave Smith, and a local board member, John Dawes. Other employees from both The National Aviary and Powdermill also watched. The blind was jam packed with eager spectators, and the pressure was on.

But no eagle appeared. Finally, Lanzone weighed, measured and banded the little red-tail on its right leg. That red-tail may have been little but it was mighty and bit Lanzone on the finger, unlike the previous one they had banded.

“All of them have different personalities, like people,” Lanzone said.

In the midst of that, number 15 golden eagle flew past. As numbers 17 and 18 flew over without coming down to the bait, Todd Katzner delivered a mini-lecture on eastern golden eagles. Because easterns are smaller than westerns, it’s a “reasonable probability that it’s a subspecies,” he explained, “even though no work has been done to establish it.”

He also said that in addition to possibly killing golden eagles, wind mills on the mountaintops might deflect the eagles off good lift areas along the ridges.

Then three more golden eagles diverted our attention as they flew up from behind the ridge, and by 12:10 we had counted 21.

“Come on, eagles,” Lanzone muttered under his breath when numbers 22 and 23 appeared with a red-tail on their right. Then they dropped below the tree line again.

Mike Lanzone with the bow net (photo: Todd Katzner)

The visitors grew hungry as lunch time came and went. Then another red-tail flew straight from the ridge to the bait. Lanzone sprang the net and made a perfect catch. As they were taking photos of the hawk out in the field with the visitors looking on, an adult golden eagle flew over, giving all of us a perfect view.After weighing, measuring, and banding that hawk, the visitors helped to release it. It hadn’t been the golden eagle we had been hoping for, but no one could deny the excitement of watching the beautiful red-tail take the bait.

The visitors headed back down for their belated lunches, but I remained watching with the researchers. (I had already learned to carry lots of snack food and water.) Altogether, we counted 29 golden eagles. Then the flight was over at 2:30 p.m. even though we continued to peer intently through the blind windows for another hour. All we saw were two flocks of tundra swans.

On December 4 it was 19 degrees and windy. By the time I reached the blind, shortly after 9:00 a.m., 11 golden eagles had already flown past. Number 10 had almost come in, Lanzone told me.

Snow flurries seemed to slow down the flight, although numbers 12 and 13 flew past. Again lunchtime came and went and then, at 2:12 p.m. Lanzone lowered the flaps and whispered, “She’s coming. Nobody move.”

An enormous adult female golden eagle came down on the bait 25 feet from the blind. We had an eye-filling look at this fierce creature as Lanzone sprang the bow net. It snagged on a broken stem of goldenrod. The eagle hesitated and then took off fast. Lanzone was furious. After two immature males, they were eager to catch a mature female.

To add insult to injury, while they were re-setting the trap, two more golden eagles flew past. Then two more, traveling as a pair, also sailed over. Lanzone told me that golden eagles will rarely stoop to bait when they are together.

They spotted another single, number 19. The flaps went down again and tension was high in the blind, but that one too ignored the bait.

We did catch another red-tail. This one came over the ridge. I released it after it was weighed, measured, and banded. Or I tried to release it, holding it firmly by its feet and laying it on its back, as Lanzone instructed, but it refused to turn over and fly off as it was supposed to. It still thought it was caught. Finally, it stood up and spread its wings, posing for photos for several minutes, before Lanzone came out of the blind and helped it to realize that it could fly off.

And that was it for the day. But when Lanzone later checked a hawk count site on the web, he learned that with our 19 goldens we had had, by far, the most goldens in the state both that day and on December 2 with 29.

The following day two goldens passed by 10:00 a.m. It was 22 degrees and snow flurries often obscured Bald Eagle Ridge. Lanzone, Miller, and baby Phoebe were in the blind, and after three fruitless hours of watching, Lanzone asked if I could show him the big talus slope down the ridge where our son Steve had often observed raptors.

Tired of sitting in the blind, I said, “Sure,” and off we went to see if any golden eagles were flying past there.

After a mile, we reached the talus slope, which spreads halfway down the ridge. I picked my way down over the rocks for a short ways and then waited as Lanzone looked over the entire talus slope. He returned after nearly an hour very excited. He was almost certain that the golden eagles would be flying at eye level along this side of the ridge. If only he could get a blind and trap set up there. But where? And how? We walked back along the old, rock-choked, logging road and down the steep Steiner/Scott Trail as he tried to figure out if it would be possible to get a four wheel drive vehicle with supplies within a reasonable distance of the talus slope.After a still, warm day, December 7 dawned cold and overcast with snow squalls and a northwest wind. Lanzone had emailed me late the previous night to say that he and Miller would be here, but he planned to return to the talus slope.

Miller arrived after 10:00 a.m. with Phoebe and told me a story that I could scarcely believe. Lanzone and Lewis Grove, who worked at Powdermill also, had arrived before dawn in a four wheel drive, which they had driven up the Steiner/Scott Trail and down the rocky logging road. Then, making 18 trips in the dark with headlamps on up and down the treacherous, ice and snow-covered rocks, they had set up both a blind and bait. Already they had seen an eagle.

The talus slope blind in October 2007 (photo: Dave Bonta)

As Miller was setting up, they called on her cell phone to say that three more golden eagles had come by. A few minutes later I looked up and there they were above the ridge.

Then the snow flurried hard and a snow fog developed, which nearly hid the ridges. But shortly after 1:00 p.m., while it was still snowing, Miller spotted a male Cooper’s hawk sitting in a nearby tree. In the hawk came to the bait. It was thoroughly tangled in the bow net, and she patiently untangled it. She put a band on it, and I released it. Unlike the red-tail, the Cooper’s hawk exploded into the air.

In the meantime, Lanzone and Grove counted nine golden eagles before the flurries turned to squalls. By evening, two inches of snow had fallen. That evening Miller, Lanzone, and Phoebe spent the night in our guesthouse.

Still another windy day, 14 degrees and clear. Miller, Phoebe and I occupied the spruce grove blind and Lanzone the talus slope blind. But he missed three golden eagles because the bait had spooked the eagles.

Later, I heard from Lanzone that still another golden eagle had flown in low to look over the situation. That one had landed on a rock next to the bait and bow trap. The eagle had studied it some more, and had finally flown off.

The trapping spot on the talus slope in October 2007 (photo: Dave Bonta)

With that, the golden eagle saga here ended for the year. Comparing notes with Miller, Lanzone discovered that he saw many more golden eagles at the talus slope than Miller did in the blind. A large number stay below the ridgetop and even those that do pop up are flying too fast to stop for a look, except for the female that got away.

And the researchers did get the chance to use that third radio-tag. On January 5 wildlife officials in West Virginia contacted them about an immature male golden eagle that had been caught in a leghold trap for several days. The National Aviary’s Director of Veterinary Services and Animal Programs, Dr. Pilar Fish, said that “both sides of his leg were cut down to the bone from the trap, and the bone was crushed on one side, though not broken completely…He was dehydrated, stressed and infection had set in.” But after three months of expert rehabilitation, the bird was healthy enough to release, on March 22, where they had found him near Scherr, West Virginia.

In the meantime, I followed the other two eagles’ progress on The National Aviary’s website. The Thanksgiving eagle (called eagle 39) spent his winter mostly in southeastern West Virginia and the other eagle tagged on the Allegheny Front (eagle 40) wandered between southeastern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. In March both migrated back through our area on their way to northern Quebec above tree line. Eagle 39 stayed above the western bulge of Labrador in Quebec and Eagle 40 at the edge of Ungava Bay. Both are probably defending territory, according to Katzner, because they have been staying put.

Eagle 41, the rehabbed bird, remained near his release site until May 10, and then he headed for Canada like the other two. He too ended up at the edge of Ungava Bay.

“It takes an eagle about five years to reach maturity and nobody is really sure what happens to eastern golden eagles in the time between when they are hatched and when they begin the breeding phase of their life,” Katzner said.

With the radio-tagging of three immature males, they’re beginning to find out. We will continue to follow the paths of eagles 39, 40, and 41 on The National Aviary website, and we’ll hope that this year one of the radio-tagged golden eagles will be caught on our talus slope.

Mike releases one of the two eagles radio-tagged at the Allegheny Front Hawkwatch in November 2006 (photo: Todd Katzner)

__________

The Pennsylvania Game Commission has partnered with the National Aviary and the Powdermill Nature Reserve, which is the field station of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, on the golden eagle study. They have given a $25,000 State Wildlife Grant that will add to the substantial funding by the National Aviary and the Carnegie Museum. Other researchers who are assisting in the study, officially titled, “Assessing Conservation Needs of Eastern Golden Eagles in Pennsylvania” are David Brandes of Lafayette College and Dan Ombalski of the Tussey Mountain Hawkwatch. A white paper recently released by the five researchers, Raptors and Wind Energy Development in the Central Appalachians: Where We Stand [PDF], says that “because of their demography, migration, and winter flight behavior, and high vulnerability to wind turbines, we consider Eastern Golden Eagles to be the eastern U.S. species at highest risk of population-scale impacts from wind energy development.”

Golden Eagle Days (Part 1)

“I think that the Bald Eagle Ridge is the single best place in Pennsylvania to observe golden eagles,” Mike Lanzone told us. He was talking about our mountain, which is the westernmost ridge in Pennsylvania’s ridge and valley province.

Lanzone is the Assistant Field Ornithology Projects Coordinator for the Powdermill Avian Research Center. He, along with his wife Trish Miller, who is GIS coordinator for the Powdermill Nature Reserve near Ligonier, and Dr. Todd Katzner, Director of Conservation and Field Research at The National Aviary in Pittsburgh, were interested in live-trapping and radio-tagging golden eagles on our property.

Those eagles would be part of a larger study to determine the impacts of wind farms, which have been proposed for our ridge and many others in central Pennsylvania, on golden eagle migration both in the spring, when they favor nearby Tussey Mountain, and in the autumn, when the Bald Eagle Ridge and the Allegheny Front are heavily used. They also hoped to identify “critical migration bottlenecks where turbine development should proceed with caution,” according to Katzner.

In addition, so little is known about the behavior of eastern golden eagles, for instance, where and how individual eastern golden eagles migrate through the Appalachian flyway, that radio-tagged eagles would help to resolve those questions.

Golden eagles are a holarctic species that lives throughout Europe, Asia, and north Africa. Of the six named subspecies, only one, Aquila chrysaetos canadensis, has been classified for all of North America. Most of the research on golden eagles in North America has been done in the West, although eager raptor watchers have been observing and counting these magnificent dark brown birds with their seven-foot wingspans for decades at such well-known places as Hawk Mountain and Waggoner’s Gap, both on the easternmost ridge in the ridge and valley province, and more recently on other ridges and on the Allegheny Front.

Year by year the numbers of eastern golden eagles have inched upward, and last autumn was no exception. Hawk Mountain tallied their highest number ever — 171 — and Waggoner’s Gap, long identified as the place to view migrating golden eagles in the fall, counted 269.

We were confident, when we first met with Lanzone, Katzner, and Robert Mulvihill, the Field Ornithology Projects Coordinator for Powdermill, on a balmy, late September day, that golden eagles would be migrating along our mountaintop the first two weeks in November as they always had. The scientists were confident that those birds would come zooming down Bald Eagle Ridge on the northwest winds, see our open First Field, and fly toward it. After all, there aren’t many fields on top of the ridge, and this is a bird that likes open vistas for hunting and nesting.

Katzner and Lanzone planned to build a blind at the edge of our Norway spruce grove and asked my husband Bruce to cut the field, which is really an overground meadow, in front of the grove. Bruce did his work with our tractor and brush hog, and the scientists arrived on the first of November to do theirs. It took them two days of hard work to set up the blind and the two spring-loaded bow net traps. The finished six-by-eight-foot blind, which they hauled up in sections in their pickup truck, looked as good or better than ones we have seen at wildlife refuges. They painted its plywood sides brown and green and had designed a long, narrow, tinted window in the front for their observation with flaps that would be lowered when they spotted a bird heading for the bait. They also designed two small side windows and four small windows on the roof for observing visitors like me. Lastly, they attached spruce boughs on its front and sides and draped them over the roof. Even I had a hard time spotting the blind tucked in among the spruces.

Then they prepared the field and set up their two bow nets. Lanzone used an electric lawnmower to cut the grass closer around the nets while Katzner hand dug and removed all the black locust snags and roots and other possible woody debris on which the nets might catch. They also painted a camouflage brown the shiny tubes that supported the net and the white surgical tubes that they buried in the ground and covered with dried grass, because it was imperative that the scene look as natural as possible. The buried tubes were threaded with rope attached to the net and were controlled by the ornithologists through small holes in the blind.

By then I was anxious. Already four days were gone in those critical first two November weeks. On the other hand, the weather was either misty and still or beautiful and still. Where were the cold, northwest winds of November?

Then came the ninth of the month and Lanzone, Miller, and seven-month-old Phoebe. As they unloaded their car, two golden eagles flew past. Golden eagles, Mike told me, fly earlier in the morning than most raptors. Later, two more goldens flew by, but instead of flying toward our field, they popped up from behind the ridge, as they often do when I’m counting raptors. But the researchers did catch and band one red-tailed hawk as practice before I arrived at the blind.

We sat on overturned plastic buckets or folding chairs and Lanzone and Miller never stopped scanning the horizon for eagles. I was impressed with their dedication and the incredible patience of baby Phoebe who played on a blanket with toys or obligingly nursed or slept.

Nothing happened during my visit so I carefully exited the blind via the back door, which led into the depths of the spruce grove, and then walked home through the forest so that I was hidden from any potential eagles.

As I crossed the small, powerline right-of-way near our home, I noticed a large, dark bird hovering and flying slowly above the field. A red-tail chasing it looked small against what was an adult golden eagle. I watched until the eagle circled high and flew across the ridge. Apparently, it then dropped below the ridgetop because Miller and Lanzone never saw it.Clear, warm, and beautiful; warm and raining; overcast and still. Would Indian summer never end? Lanzone and Miller (and baby Phoebe) came off and on, and I shared time in the blind with them, but we all agreed that never had there been such bad November weather for the golden eagle flight. By the third week in November we had had not one good, windy day.

At last, on November 17, the wind picked up, providing the updrafts and thermals the golden eagles needed to speed them southward. Katzner and Lanzone arrived shortly after noon. Instead of golden eagles, though, the red-tails were flying. First one immature stooped on the bait, but the bow net caught on shards of goldenrod stems when they sprang it. The immature flew into a tree and watched as another immature landed across from it.

Suddenly a mature red-tail zeroed in, grabbed the bait, and “blam,” that net sprang over the red-tail. The men raced out of the blind and untangled the hawk. They banded that one and a second red-tail they caught later, they told me back at the house.

What encouraged them was that they had spotted the red-tails far down the ridge. Then the red-tails seemed to disappear. But both had popped up above the ridge and turned sharply left to fly over the top of the field and grab the bait.

“A good sign,” Katzner said, that maybe the eagles would do the same.

Hopeful that the windy weather would hold, they camped out overnight in the blind. But by morning it was once again back to still and overcast. I joined them in the blind in the afternoon, and all we saw was one sharp-shinned hawk that tried twice to grab the bait and missed and a Cooper’s hawk that did likewise.

Lanzone showed up on the 20th even though it was still and overcast. He had heard that 35 golden eagles had flown down Franklin Mountain in New York state the previous day and expected a flight along our ridge. He did spot two golden eagles, but they flew over the ridge and down into the valley. He also counted 1500 tundra swans, 200 Bonaparte’s gulls, and several ring-billed and herring gulls. At least something was moving. And Lanzone, who has been counting birds and live-trapping raptors since he was a boy of nine in New York state, couldn’t resist tallying whatever birds he saw during his long hours in the blind.

Thanksgiving dawned rainy and misty. Even though the trio had talked about coming here, I didn’t expect them. Surely they were home enjoying the holiday and forgetting about golden eagles just as we were.

Wrong! Three days later I received an email from Katzner. They had caught two immatures — a four-year-old male golden eagle on Thanksgiving and a two-year-old male two days later at their other blind near Central City beneath the Allegheny Front Hawkwatch. The day before Thanksgiving, Katzner wrote, “was about the most frustrating eagle trapping day that we’d had. We sat in our blind under the Allegheny Front Hawkwatch and watched 39 [golden] eagles fly by us. A few glanced at our bait, but none came in anywhere close to the traps we’d set. Thanksgiving Day turned out to be a different kind of day.” Indeed it was.

Trish Miller and Mike Lanzone with one of the immature goldens they trapped at the Allegheny Front Hawkwatch last year

While I was happy for the researchers, I was sad that no golden eagle had been tagged here. Miller had actually sprung the trap, just as she had done the previous year when most knowledgeable ornithologists had thought it impossible to capture and radio-tag eastern golden eagles.

Once they banded the birds and took their measurements, they attached to each one’s back a satellite telemetry device using a nonabrasive harness made of Teflon ribbon. It contained a solar panel and weighed 70 grams, a weight that didn’t seem to bother the eagles.

In the meantime, I hung out in the blind by myself, vainly watching for any raptor movement at all during the last dreary days of November. By then rifle season had begun, and our hunters had agreed to give First Field and its environs a wide berth. They too hoped that the researchers would score.

Part 2 continues on December 1.

The last photo is by Todd Katzner; all others are by Dave Bonta.