Kris
January 31st, 2004, 02:11 AM
January 31, 2004
Crossing Their (Flight) Path
By ANTHONY DePALMA
Peering with predator eyes as a bald eagle rips into a dead deer on the snow-covered banks of the Delaware River, Peter E. Nye waits.
There is no sound except the gurgle of the ice-clogged river and the caws of crows the eagle had chased away. "Power on," Mr. Nye says, holding a radio transmitter in both hands like a video game controller. "Here we go." The words come out slowly. Then he presses the detonator.
There is a flash, then a boom. A rocket-powered 40-foot-by-60-foot net unfurls in milliseconds and Mr. Nye, leader of the endangered species unit of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, captures E-99, a two-and-a-half-year-old female bald eagle that it turns out he knows well: he tagged her in May 2001 when she was an eaglet in a nest 30 miles upstream from this isolated riverside spot, between Barryville and Narrowsburg, N.Y., which he keeps secret to protect the eagles.
Mr. Nye, 53, has spent most of his adult life trying to save bald eagles from extinction, and he has netted, tagged and nursed from eaglets hundreds of them over the two decades he has been in charge of one of the most successful reintroduction programs in the country.
When he started in the early 1970's, there was only one nesting pair of eagles in New York. Today there are more than 75 pairs, and bald eagles are no longer such rare sights, especially during the coldest, snowiest days of deep winter when the Upper Delaware swirls with them. For those who know where to find them, spotting one is like glimpsing a shooting star with wings. There's wonder and awe and a fleeting feeling of good fortune.
But as he prepares to outfit E-99 with a radio transmitter, Mr. Nye is worried. While the pesticide DDT was the bald eagles' greatest threat 30 years ago, development and suburban sprawl are widely viewed today as a grave danger to the bald eagle's long-term survival.
"Loss of habitat is the biggest threat facing eagles right now," said Karen Steenhof, a biologist with United States Geological Survey and coordinator of the national midwinter bald eagle survey. Over the last 15 years, bald eagle populations have generally grown fastest in states where human population growth has been slowest, Ms. Steenhof said.
But the spread of second homes and vacation resorts around major cities is increasing pressure on bald eagles throughout the Northeast. During an aerial survey of New York earlier this month to count eagles for the national study, Mr. Nye was shocked by the vast areas of woodlands he saw cleared for development.
"You can see these big steep-sloped hillsides totally denuded," he said.
Driving through the area, Mr. Nye has also seen signs for Eagle Valley Realty, Eagle's Nest Estates and other commercial names that concern him. And every year he finds birds that have been electrocuted by power lines, strangled in fishing tackle or fatally disturbed in their nests.
"Their numbers are going through the roof," he said, "but the question now is whether, by 2050, the habitat they need is still going to be here to support them or will we keep whittling away at it so that the habitat disappears?" Within a decade after the federal government banned DDT in 1972, eagle populations everywhere started to rebound. Mr. Nye and other biologists helped nature along by bringing in eaglets from Alaska and raising them in local nests. In 1995, the bald eagle was reclassified as threatened instead of endangered, and today New York has a growing year-round population and and hundreds of visiting eagles from Canada that +spend winter in spots along the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.
To better understand the details of what the eagles need to thrive along the upper reaches of the Delaware River, Mr. Nye has just embarked on a three-year joint study with the National Park Service to trap and tag eagles. A similar effort along the Hudson River has just been completed.
"We want to find out where they are, the distance from their nests to the nearest house or road, the slope of the land they prefer, the type of tree they choose, the level of recreational use nearby," Mr. Nye said. "Then we can apply the information to the rest of the Delaware Valley and use a computer model to tell what are the essential habitats and the potential habitats, and then we can make recommendations about land use in the valley."
E-99 was the first eagle trapped under the new Delaware Valley study. Caught under the net, it twisted itself into an angry ball of feathers and the slashing yellow bayonets that are its talons. Mr. Nye, a wiry man with silver hair, and his friend Steven E. Lawrence, a retired machine operator who has helped tag eagles on a volunteer basis for 17 years, carefully disentangled the huge bird. Having had hands punctured through by an eagle's talon, or having been beaten over the head by a powerful wing, they have a healthy respect for the eagles and an appreciation of their presence.
"If you see one up close it's unbelievable," Mr. Nye said. "The eyes especially are so piercing and so intense."
E-99 was born in the wild, but she is undoubtedly the progeny of the eaglets Mr. Nye has carried down from Alaska over the last 30 years. Still considered immature, she does not yet have the distinctive white head and striking white tail that are like beacons for eagles in the wild.
The men put a leather hood on her head and Mr. Lawrence held her under his arm, which is like trying to hold down a thunderbolt. Mr. Nye handled her gently as he fit her with a radio transmitter that she will carry like a backpack. He guided the four nylon straps on the transmitter under her chocolate brown wings and across her chest.
"You're being pretty good there, Sweetie," he cooed as he pulled the straps taut and then sewed them together with cotton thread that will deteriorate in about two years, allowing the transmitter to drop off. Until then, she will send back information about where she eats, where she roosts and perhaps even where in a few years she will build her nest.
"A big part of me wants to just leave these birds alone," Mr. Nye said. "But my job now is protecting the resources we already have."
That includes taking the midwinter survey and crisscrossing the state in a helicopter on a single, nausea-inducing day this month when 41 other states also conducted surveys. The aerial sightings are checked against information gathered by spotters, including Lori Danuff-McKean, stationed at designated spots around the state.
Ms. Danuff-McKean, founder and director of the Eagle Institute in Barryville, N.Y., and Lackawaxen, Pa., was assigned to an observation hut at one of the eagles' favorite winter stops, the Mongaup Falls Reservoir in Forestburgh, N.Y.
Preliminary results from the state survey show a decline of one-quarter to one-third from the 354 tallied in New York last year, the first drop in a decade. But biologists are not panicking. They say year-to-year variations are not reliable indicators of longer-term trends, and usually reflect little more than changes in the weather.
The fluctuating numbers did not diminish the thrill of seeing so many eagles. Because she was born in Brooklyn, and moved up to the Delaware Valley as a young adult, Ms. Danuff-McKean has a special respect for bald eagles and the wilderness areas that sustain them. That respect led her to found the Eagle Institute five years ago.
"People say to me that now that the eagle is not endangered, you're out of work," she said. "But I tell them that my job is now more important than ever. We've reintroduced them successfully, but if we don't educate the public and say this is what the eagles need to survive, they won't last.''
Ms. Danuff-McKean insisted that she was not anti-development. "I'm married to a developer," she said, "but development has to be done in a planned and intelligent fashion." Her husband's family runs McKean Realty, one of the largest real estate companies in the region.
"The key now is education," she said.
Just then, she spotted an adult bald eagle perched regally in a backyard tree near the confluence of the Delaware and Lackawaxen Rivers. "So how do we convince the person who bought that house not to cut down that tree or do construction during the breeding season in the spring?" she said. The answer, she said, is creating a sense of stewardship, so everyone has a stake in the survival of E-99 and other bald eagles.
"People who live around here need to feel that 'these are my eagles,' " she said, "and they need to be willing to say, 'I'm going to do whatever I can to protect them.' "
O.K., What Flies Over Grant's Tomb?
By JOSEPH BERGER
This winter's unrelenting cold spell has produced one dividend to warm even the chilliest New Yorker's heart: wild bald eagles have been hitching rides on ice floes in the Hudson River as far south as Battery Park and spiraling across the skies over Grant's Tomb.
"I'm wondering if I really could have seen a bald eagle flying over the Hudson River this afternoon?" asked one e-mail sent to New York City Audubon by a startled member who had taken a walk Thursday in Riverside Park near 104th Street. "Since I've been trained in spotting their large bodies and large tails while in the Pacific Northwest, when I caught that sight over the Hudson today I had to do a double take."
Urban park rangers for the city's Department of Parks and Recreation have also been doing double takes. While stray eagles have in some years been spotted migrating across the boundaries of the five boroughs, the rangers have been dazzled by the profusion of eagles they are seeing this year and the fact that some eagles are lingering for days. In the last four weeks, rangers have repeatedly spotted a mother and two of her young on an ice floe near the George Washington Bridge, and on Monday a department falconer saw an eagle on an ice floe near the Battery.
On Thursday, when three urban park rangers - Sara Hobel, the rangers' director; Tom Cullen, a master falconer; and Yvonne McDermott, the wildlife manager - took a reporter and photographer to a lookout on the Palisades three miles north of the bridge, a white-capped adult, its broad wingspan flat as an ironing board, sailed in for a landing below them. A few moments later, a dark-headed immature eagle could be seen soaring over the waters off Spuyten Duyvil, which divide the Bronx from Manhattan, and another was perched in a tree near a boat landing at Englewood on the New Jersey side.
After tramping back through the snow from the edge of the cliffs, Ms. Hobel said that the eagles she had seen were almost surely not any of the eight baby Wisconsin eagles the rangers introduced over the last two years in Inwood Hill Park to demonstrate that these raptors can thrive in a city's gritty environment. For one thing, none is old enough to have an adult's white head. Still, Ms. Hobel speculated that the presence of the Inwood Hill eagles had shown their wilder cousins that the city environment was congenial.
Like northern suburbanites heading south to find fresh fish at Le Bernardin, eagles have been heading toward Manhattan in search of catfish, eels and shad because the lakes and streams farther north are mostly iced over. The lower Hudson, though, still has a channel of slate-gray fresh water and the eagles hop among the floes waiting for a fish - sometimes a dead or disoriented one - to streak by. Eagles have vision eight times as acute as humans and they can snare a fish in their swift talons jetting at 50 miles an hour, experts say.
Tom Lake, a naturalist with the State Department of Environmental Conservation who specializes in the Hudson River estuary, said this winter's prolonged freeze had meant that floes of ice were moving farther south than usual and that foraging eagles had been cruising on those floes.
"Eagles use ice floes the way you would use the moving sidewalk at J.F.K.," he said. "They're saving energy while at the same time they're getting a meal."
After a hundred-year absence, the first eaglet was born on the river in 1997, Mr. Lake said. There are now eight nests and 60 eagles that call the river home.
Peter Nye, leader of the endangered species unit of the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, said that the presence of eagles as far south as the Wall Street district would be "an aberrant occurrence."
But Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, said that the appearance of the eagles was another indication that the overdevelopment of the suburbs had made the city, with its 40,000 acres of parkland and an increasingly robust ecology, more attractive. While exotic birds have always used the city as a caravansary, a red-tailed hawk has set up permanent quarters above the window of a Fifth Avenue luxury building and great blue herons have been biding time at islands off the Triborough Bridge.
"This puts the lie to the notion that an urban environment is inappropriate for eagles," Mr. Benepe said.
Ms. Hobel also sees their sojourn here in more promising terms.
"The world is going to get more urban, so if we can figure out how to maintain their species in an urban setting, we're way ahead of the game," she said.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Live Eagle Cam (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_about/parks_divisions/urban_park_rangers/eaglecam/rangercam.html)
Crossing Their (Flight) Path
By ANTHONY DePALMA
Peering with predator eyes as a bald eagle rips into a dead deer on the snow-covered banks of the Delaware River, Peter E. Nye waits.
There is no sound except the gurgle of the ice-clogged river and the caws of crows the eagle had chased away. "Power on," Mr. Nye says, holding a radio transmitter in both hands like a video game controller. "Here we go." The words come out slowly. Then he presses the detonator.
There is a flash, then a boom. A rocket-powered 40-foot-by-60-foot net unfurls in milliseconds and Mr. Nye, leader of the endangered species unit of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, captures E-99, a two-and-a-half-year-old female bald eagle that it turns out he knows well: he tagged her in May 2001 when she was an eaglet in a nest 30 miles upstream from this isolated riverside spot, between Barryville and Narrowsburg, N.Y., which he keeps secret to protect the eagles.
Mr. Nye, 53, has spent most of his adult life trying to save bald eagles from extinction, and he has netted, tagged and nursed from eaglets hundreds of them over the two decades he has been in charge of one of the most successful reintroduction programs in the country.
When he started in the early 1970's, there was only one nesting pair of eagles in New York. Today there are more than 75 pairs, and bald eagles are no longer such rare sights, especially during the coldest, snowiest days of deep winter when the Upper Delaware swirls with them. For those who know where to find them, spotting one is like glimpsing a shooting star with wings. There's wonder and awe and a fleeting feeling of good fortune.
But as he prepares to outfit E-99 with a radio transmitter, Mr. Nye is worried. While the pesticide DDT was the bald eagles' greatest threat 30 years ago, development and suburban sprawl are widely viewed today as a grave danger to the bald eagle's long-term survival.
"Loss of habitat is the biggest threat facing eagles right now," said Karen Steenhof, a biologist with United States Geological Survey and coordinator of the national midwinter bald eagle survey. Over the last 15 years, bald eagle populations have generally grown fastest in states where human population growth has been slowest, Ms. Steenhof said.
But the spread of second homes and vacation resorts around major cities is increasing pressure on bald eagles throughout the Northeast. During an aerial survey of New York earlier this month to count eagles for the national study, Mr. Nye was shocked by the vast areas of woodlands he saw cleared for development.
"You can see these big steep-sloped hillsides totally denuded," he said.
Driving through the area, Mr. Nye has also seen signs for Eagle Valley Realty, Eagle's Nest Estates and other commercial names that concern him. And every year he finds birds that have been electrocuted by power lines, strangled in fishing tackle or fatally disturbed in their nests.
"Their numbers are going through the roof," he said, "but the question now is whether, by 2050, the habitat they need is still going to be here to support them or will we keep whittling away at it so that the habitat disappears?" Within a decade after the federal government banned DDT in 1972, eagle populations everywhere started to rebound. Mr. Nye and other biologists helped nature along by bringing in eaglets from Alaska and raising them in local nests. In 1995, the bald eagle was reclassified as threatened instead of endangered, and today New York has a growing year-round population and and hundreds of visiting eagles from Canada that +spend winter in spots along the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.
To better understand the details of what the eagles need to thrive along the upper reaches of the Delaware River, Mr. Nye has just embarked on a three-year joint study with the National Park Service to trap and tag eagles. A similar effort along the Hudson River has just been completed.
"We want to find out where they are, the distance from their nests to the nearest house or road, the slope of the land they prefer, the type of tree they choose, the level of recreational use nearby," Mr. Nye said. "Then we can apply the information to the rest of the Delaware Valley and use a computer model to tell what are the essential habitats and the potential habitats, and then we can make recommendations about land use in the valley."
E-99 was the first eagle trapped under the new Delaware Valley study. Caught under the net, it twisted itself into an angry ball of feathers and the slashing yellow bayonets that are its talons. Mr. Nye, a wiry man with silver hair, and his friend Steven E. Lawrence, a retired machine operator who has helped tag eagles on a volunteer basis for 17 years, carefully disentangled the huge bird. Having had hands punctured through by an eagle's talon, or having been beaten over the head by a powerful wing, they have a healthy respect for the eagles and an appreciation of their presence.
"If you see one up close it's unbelievable," Mr. Nye said. "The eyes especially are so piercing and so intense."
E-99 was born in the wild, but she is undoubtedly the progeny of the eaglets Mr. Nye has carried down from Alaska over the last 30 years. Still considered immature, she does not yet have the distinctive white head and striking white tail that are like beacons for eagles in the wild.
The men put a leather hood on her head and Mr. Lawrence held her under his arm, which is like trying to hold down a thunderbolt. Mr. Nye handled her gently as he fit her with a radio transmitter that she will carry like a backpack. He guided the four nylon straps on the transmitter under her chocolate brown wings and across her chest.
"You're being pretty good there, Sweetie," he cooed as he pulled the straps taut and then sewed them together with cotton thread that will deteriorate in about two years, allowing the transmitter to drop off. Until then, she will send back information about where she eats, where she roosts and perhaps even where in a few years she will build her nest.
"A big part of me wants to just leave these birds alone," Mr. Nye said. "But my job now is protecting the resources we already have."
That includes taking the midwinter survey and crisscrossing the state in a helicopter on a single, nausea-inducing day this month when 41 other states also conducted surveys. The aerial sightings are checked against information gathered by spotters, including Lori Danuff-McKean, stationed at designated spots around the state.
Ms. Danuff-McKean, founder and director of the Eagle Institute in Barryville, N.Y., and Lackawaxen, Pa., was assigned to an observation hut at one of the eagles' favorite winter stops, the Mongaup Falls Reservoir in Forestburgh, N.Y.
Preliminary results from the state survey show a decline of one-quarter to one-third from the 354 tallied in New York last year, the first drop in a decade. But biologists are not panicking. They say year-to-year variations are not reliable indicators of longer-term trends, and usually reflect little more than changes in the weather.
The fluctuating numbers did not diminish the thrill of seeing so many eagles. Because she was born in Brooklyn, and moved up to the Delaware Valley as a young adult, Ms. Danuff-McKean has a special respect for bald eagles and the wilderness areas that sustain them. That respect led her to found the Eagle Institute five years ago.
"People say to me that now that the eagle is not endangered, you're out of work," she said. "But I tell them that my job is now more important than ever. We've reintroduced them successfully, but if we don't educate the public and say this is what the eagles need to survive, they won't last.''
Ms. Danuff-McKean insisted that she was not anti-development. "I'm married to a developer," she said, "but development has to be done in a planned and intelligent fashion." Her husband's family runs McKean Realty, one of the largest real estate companies in the region.
"The key now is education," she said.
Just then, she spotted an adult bald eagle perched regally in a backyard tree near the confluence of the Delaware and Lackawaxen Rivers. "So how do we convince the person who bought that house not to cut down that tree or do construction during the breeding season in the spring?" she said. The answer, she said, is creating a sense of stewardship, so everyone has a stake in the survival of E-99 and other bald eagles.
"People who live around here need to feel that 'these are my eagles,' " she said, "and they need to be willing to say, 'I'm going to do whatever I can to protect them.' "
O.K., What Flies Over Grant's Tomb?
By JOSEPH BERGER
This winter's unrelenting cold spell has produced one dividend to warm even the chilliest New Yorker's heart: wild bald eagles have been hitching rides on ice floes in the Hudson River as far south as Battery Park and spiraling across the skies over Grant's Tomb.
"I'm wondering if I really could have seen a bald eagle flying over the Hudson River this afternoon?" asked one e-mail sent to New York City Audubon by a startled member who had taken a walk Thursday in Riverside Park near 104th Street. "Since I've been trained in spotting their large bodies and large tails while in the Pacific Northwest, when I caught that sight over the Hudson today I had to do a double take."
Urban park rangers for the city's Department of Parks and Recreation have also been doing double takes. While stray eagles have in some years been spotted migrating across the boundaries of the five boroughs, the rangers have been dazzled by the profusion of eagles they are seeing this year and the fact that some eagles are lingering for days. In the last four weeks, rangers have repeatedly spotted a mother and two of her young on an ice floe near the George Washington Bridge, and on Monday a department falconer saw an eagle on an ice floe near the Battery.
On Thursday, when three urban park rangers - Sara Hobel, the rangers' director; Tom Cullen, a master falconer; and Yvonne McDermott, the wildlife manager - took a reporter and photographer to a lookout on the Palisades three miles north of the bridge, a white-capped adult, its broad wingspan flat as an ironing board, sailed in for a landing below them. A few moments later, a dark-headed immature eagle could be seen soaring over the waters off Spuyten Duyvil, which divide the Bronx from Manhattan, and another was perched in a tree near a boat landing at Englewood on the New Jersey side.
After tramping back through the snow from the edge of the cliffs, Ms. Hobel said that the eagles she had seen were almost surely not any of the eight baby Wisconsin eagles the rangers introduced over the last two years in Inwood Hill Park to demonstrate that these raptors can thrive in a city's gritty environment. For one thing, none is old enough to have an adult's white head. Still, Ms. Hobel speculated that the presence of the Inwood Hill eagles had shown their wilder cousins that the city environment was congenial.
Like northern suburbanites heading south to find fresh fish at Le Bernardin, eagles have been heading toward Manhattan in search of catfish, eels and shad because the lakes and streams farther north are mostly iced over. The lower Hudson, though, still has a channel of slate-gray fresh water and the eagles hop among the floes waiting for a fish - sometimes a dead or disoriented one - to streak by. Eagles have vision eight times as acute as humans and they can snare a fish in their swift talons jetting at 50 miles an hour, experts say.
Tom Lake, a naturalist with the State Department of Environmental Conservation who specializes in the Hudson River estuary, said this winter's prolonged freeze had meant that floes of ice were moving farther south than usual and that foraging eagles had been cruising on those floes.
"Eagles use ice floes the way you would use the moving sidewalk at J.F.K.," he said. "They're saving energy while at the same time they're getting a meal."
After a hundred-year absence, the first eaglet was born on the river in 1997, Mr. Lake said. There are now eight nests and 60 eagles that call the river home.
Peter Nye, leader of the endangered species unit of the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, said that the presence of eagles as far south as the Wall Street district would be "an aberrant occurrence."
But Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, said that the appearance of the eagles was another indication that the overdevelopment of the suburbs had made the city, with its 40,000 acres of parkland and an increasingly robust ecology, more attractive. While exotic birds have always used the city as a caravansary, a red-tailed hawk has set up permanent quarters above the window of a Fifth Avenue luxury building and great blue herons have been biding time at islands off the Triborough Bridge.
"This puts the lie to the notion that an urban environment is inappropriate for eagles," Mr. Benepe said.
Ms. Hobel also sees their sojourn here in more promising terms.
"The world is going to get more urban, so if we can figure out how to maintain their species in an urban setting, we're way ahead of the game," she said.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Live Eagle Cam (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_about/parks_divisions/urban_park_rangers/eaglecam/rangercam.html)