Return of the Bald Eagles
Bald eagles on the Pine Creek Rail-Trail (photo: Travis Pebble, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)
Eight inches of fresh snow covered Sinking Valley. It was early in February 2011 and our son, Steve, and I were conducting our annual Winter Raptor Survey while my husband, Bruce, drove the car. I had been participating in the survey every winter since Greg Grove first started this statewide count back in 2001. When our son, who is a super birder with incredible eyesight, moved back to the area, I recruited him to sit up front next to Bruce, where he had a more panoramic view, while I retired to the back seat.
Usually, he saw most of the raptors first and many more than Bruce and I had tallied in the early years. But on that morning, a bracing 19 degrees under a partly cloudy sky, the pickings were slim at first — an American kestrel and one red-tailed hawk. As the wind picked up, though, we counted more red-tails, another kestrel, and a northern harrier dipping low over a field.
Then, we made our usual stop at an Amish store, and the owner told us that her ten-year-old son, David, who is a keen birder, had seen a mature bald eagle through his binoculars that morning. It was the fourth time he had seen one in the valley that winter.
I sat up even straighter in the back seat, scanning every squirrel’s nest in every copse of trees. Sometimes a “nest” turned out to be a raptor. Finally, I spotted a “nest” that seemed to be suspended from a distant tree. I kept looking at it, and all I could see was a dark spot. But I pointed it out to Steve, and he said, “It’s a mature bald eagle.”
I looked and looked again through my binoculars and finally saw the white head and tail, which had blended into the snowy background. Steve set the scope up outside our car, and we all had an excellent view of the first bald eagle ever on our count. Even though it took Steve’s superior eyes to distinguish the bird, I had pointed out the “nest” and felt as if I had made a laudable contribution to our survey.
In an age of uncountable losses in the natural world, the bald eagle success story bears repeating because three decades ago a sighting such as ours would have been impossible. And when the Pennsylvania Game Commission decided, back in 1983, to try hacking by obtaining young eaglets from Saskatchewan, Canada, where they are common, hand-rearing, and then releasing them in good eagle habitat, namely along the Susquehanna and Delaware river watersheds, no one would have predicted the incredible comeback of this charismatic raptor.
In July of 1989, Bruce and I, on assignment for the now defunct Pennsylvania Wildlife magazine, visited Haldeman Island, one of two hacking sites in the commonwealth, with Jerry Hassinger, then the Endangered Species Program coordinator for the Game Commission.
The hacking tower on Haldeman Island, 1989 (Bruce Bonta)
The two-and-a-half mile long, three-quarters of a mile wide island on the Susquehanna River, with its mixture of wetlands, fields and woods, seemed ideal habitat for bald eagles: close to the river yet secluded and protected from humans.
We parked a distance from the hacking tower and quietly ascended the ladder leading to the nest compartments. There we watched as one of the three hackers, without being seen, fed five eaglets in two nest compartments. The eaglets eagerly consumed the live and dead fish the hackers fed them.
Later, I peered through the one-way glass on the compartments and watched as the eaglets yawned, preened, or looked out over the top of their nest, through the front windows facing the river. Already their plumage was turning the dark brown of immature, a color scheme they keep until their fifth year when both sexes, the larger female and smaller male; obtain their regal white heads and tails.
Although we had seen bald eagles in the Pymatuning/Conneaut Marsh area in northwestern Pennsylvania where a few pairs had nested even during the DDT years, the previous December we had had to travel to Maryland below the Conowingo Dam for superb views of numerous wintering bald eagles. So it was a privilege to see the eaglets at Haldeman Island and know that the summer before, a wild pair had nested successfully on both Hennery Island near Susquehanna State Park and in the Safe Harbor Dam area.
Led by the pioneering hacking efforts of Pete Nye in New York state beginning in 1976, Pennsylvania, along with Massachusetts, New Jersey and Ontario followed suit, which greatly increased the northeastern bald eagle population through the 1980s and into the 1990s. But who would expect that in 2011, Game Commission biologists would know of at least 211 nests, 103 of which were successful, fledging a minimum of 165 fledglings. And, Patti Barber, a wildlife biologist for the agency, says that all those numbers are conservative.
So far, 50 counties have bald eagle nests, but our county, Blair, is not one of them. However, having an adult bald eagle wintering in Sinking Valley, near the Little Juniata River, means that we could have a pair interested in nesting or already nesting. After all, in Pennsylvania bald eagles return to their nesting grounds as early as December through February when they engage in nest-building or repair, courtship, and breeding. Most eggs are laid between mid-February and mid-March.
Doug Gross, Endangered and Nongame Bird Section Supervisor for the Commission says that “bald eagles are still increasing with many miles of rivers still without a pair established. This is especially true in the southwest region. Pairs also are changing from one nest location to another, the second nest often more difficult to see, so we are probably missing some nests in yearly counts that are still active. Eagles often nest in difficult to see locations, especially after leaf-outs, including islands, hillsides, and swamps.”
A bald eagle family at John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Philadelphia (Bill Buchanan/USFWS)
Both Gross and Barber depend on the public to report nests and Barber says that “Some of the latest [nests] reported were found by birders walking trails in remote or rugged locations.”
These nests are usually high in live large trees such as sycamores or white pines, close to a dead tree where they perch, and within a mile or so of water. Both sexes build their nest and take anywhere from four days to three months, interweaving sticks collected from the ground or broken off of nearby trees, lining it with finer woody materials and their own downy feathers. These nests are huge, among the largest of all birds, and are often reused year after year, by a species suspected to be monogamous and mated for life unless one mate dies.
Courtship can only be described as ecstatic, featuring acrobatic flight displays, most notably the cartwheel display in which a courting pair flies high in the sky, locks talons, and tumbles down to earth breaking off at the last moment to avoid hitting the ground. Other courtship displays include the chase display, when a pair pursue each other, occasionally lock talons, rolling and diving, and the so-called roller-coaster flight, when one eagle flies high, folds its wings, and dives directly to earth, swooping back up at the last moment to avoid hitting the ground.
After all that excitement, followed by breeding, the female lays one to three, dull white eggs in the nest and begins incubating after she lays her first egg so the young hatch over a period of several days. The male helps with incubation, although his brood patch is not as well developed as the female’s. Both parents step gingerly around the eggs, which didn’t help when DDT thinned their eggshells, causing them to crack open prematurely.
After 35 days, the first youngster emerges from its egg, followed by its siblings on subsequent days. Both parents hunt and feed the nestlings, but the male does the most feeding the first two weeks while the female takes care of the nestlings. Unfortunately, the oldest, largest young gets most of the food and often the second and usually the third young starve unless food is abundant. The parents prefer large fish which they tear apart for their offspring, but they also haul in carcasses of fish, waterfowl and large mammals. One study found that the diet of nesting bald eagles was 56% fish, 28% birds, 14% mammals, and 2% other prey. Another study, on the Chesapeake Bay, discovered that Canada geese and mallards were their most common bird prey and white-tailed deer (presumably carrion) and raccoons their favorite mammal meals.
Gulls, ravens, crows, black bears and raccoons prey on bald eagle eggs. Nestlings are killed by black bears, raccoons, hawks, owls, crows, ravens, and bobcats. Siblicide is also common.
Bald eagle holding a fish in its talons at John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge (Ron Holmes/USFWS)
The fledglings reach their full size in three to four weeks, and fledge anywhere from eight to 14 weeks of age. Even though they practice beforehand by flapping their wings across their nest and on to nearby limbs to strengthen their muscles, develop flight coordination and learn how to land, more than half the time they end up on the ground where predators may find them. Usually their parents continue to feed them there. The fledglings learn to hunt on their own by scavenging fish carcasses and picking up floating fish, although at first they follow their parents for food as long as six weeks after fledging.
It takes them four years to attain adult plumage and they start breeding the following year. All things being equal, they can live more than 30 years but hazards, mostly from humans, sometimes kill them. These include shooting, trapping, lead poisoning, electrocution from power lines, and hitting other wires or vehicles.
Perry County Wildlife Conservation Officer, Steve Hower, reported that last spring had been particularly difficult for bald eagles in his county and neighboring Juniata County.
“One flew into a power line in Juniata Township, Perry County, and had to be euthanized, a second was found to be very sick sitting on the ground east of Mifflintown, Juniata County, and died shortly after it was captured; a third was found dead near Duncannon, Perry County, from an apparent respiratory infection; and a fourth was believed to be hit by a train while feeding on carrion next to railroad tracks near Newport, Perry County,” he said.
But so many deaths are unusual. One pair in Pine Creek gorge that came from the original Sholola Falls hacking project in northeastern Pennsylvania celebrated 25 years in the same area last year and is now more than 30 years old. And you can’t argue with the nest numbers in the commonwealth. Originally listed as endangered in Pennsylvania, the Game Commission now classifies bald eagles as threatened and protected under the Game and Wildlife Code. Although bald eagles are no longer endangered or threatened at the federal level, bald eagles are protected by the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Protection Treat Act.
The Sinking Valley bald eagle was seen twice last summer by friends of ours. And we hope to see it during our Winter Raptor Survey this winter. Who knows? Maybe someone in Blair County will find a nest.
Bald eagles at Long Arm Dam, York County, Pennsylvania (Henry McLin, CC BY-NC-SA)
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If you find a bald eagle nest, please report it to the Game Commission by contacting them at pgccomments@state.pa.us and use the words “Eagle Nest Information” in the subject field.
To learn more about bald eagles in Pennsylvania go to www.pgc.state.pa.us, put your cursor on “Wildlife” in the banner menu bar and then click on “Endangered Species.” Also posted are a series of guides entitled “Eagle-watching in Pennsylvania” that explain where to go, how to get there, and other wildlife viewing in that area.
Beetlemania
Semiotus marciae (photo © Sam Wells)
“Congratulations, Mom!” the email from my oldest son, Steve, said. “You finally have an organism named after you. Semiotus is a genus of very large, tropical click beetles [and] S. marciae is a species from Ecuador. Your beetle is large (about one inch) and very colorful, like all Semiotus. You’ll probably end up in quite a few collections.”
Steve is an amateur entomologist specializing in beetles. His friend, Dr. Sam Wells, is a professional entomologist who works at the Western Field Technology Station of Bayer Crop Science in Fresno, California. His specialty is click beetles. Since one of my favorite insects is the salt and pepper-colored eyed elater click beetle Alaus oculatus with its two large black false eyes on its pronotum (front part of the thorax between the head and the abdomen), I was pleased to learn that I would have my own orange and red click beetle—Marcia’s click beetle—as Steve called it.
Furthermore, he wrote that “the etymology is given in honor of Marcia Bonta, author and naturalist.” This followed the detailed description of the beetle in Kolepterologische Rundschau (translated as the Coleopterological Review), a German journal that includes an English translation.
Needless to say, I was thrilled by the honor and reminded of my early studies of the history of Pennsylvania’s natural history. They started shortly after we moved to our mountaintop home in west central Pennsylvania four decades ago, when I began learning the names of all the creatures and plants that lived here. One of the first birds I identified was the eastern phoebe—Sayornis phoebe—because four couples nested on ledges inside our garage, old outhouse, and guesthouse and plastered on the side of the springhouse.
The eastern phoebe is one of three phoebe species in North America which includes the western Say’s phoebe—Sayornis saya—doubly named for Thomas Say according to Ernest A. Choate’s The Dictionary of American Bird Names. In addition, someone named Bonaparte created the genus name Sayornis, not the Bonaparte but a nephew—Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte—who came with his family to Philadelphia in 1822 where many naturalists resided. During his six years there he re-edited a massive book on American ornithology and thus became the so-called Father of Systematic Ornithology. Bonaparte’s gull honors him.
But who was Thomas Say? Say, it turned out, is called the Father of American Entomology. Of French Protestant stock, he was born in Philadelphia in 1787. His great uncle, William Bartram, who wrote Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the first American nature book, encouraged Say to collect butterflies and beetles. At that time, Philadelphia was a hotbed of naturalists who started the Academy of Natural Sciences, and when Thomas Say joined, he found to his consternation that the collection of natural curiosities only consisted of six common insects, a few shells, a dried fish and a stuffed monkey. He resolved to increase the collection.
Thomas Say by Charles Wilson Peale (1818)
A handsome, amiable man always ready to help others, he devoted much of his life to the study of natural history, specializing in insects and shells, although in 1819, as the zoologist in Major Stephen H. Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains, he reported on everything from the Indian languages to wolves, snakes, birds, and shells. But both before and after this expedition, he published papers on insects and land shells, beginning with “Descriptions of Seven Species of American Fresh Water and Land Shells” and “Descriptions of Several New Species of North American Insects.”
Unfortunately for natural history, Say left Philadelphia in 1825 to participate in the altruistic, socialist community at New Harmony, Indiana. There he met his wife Lucy. But rancor quickly drove the founders of the community apart, and peaceful, kindly Say had to carry on with very little help, dying there in 1834 at the age of 47.
However, he left a worthy legacy in his three-volume work American Entomology or Descriptions of the Insects of North America published in 1824, 1825, and 1828. He was credited with being the first efficient and extensive describer of North American insects, especially Coleoptera (beetles).
Since beetles were his specialty, I wondered how many were named for him. After several hours on the Internet studying BugGuide.net, I found 22 insect species that honor Say from two species of caddisflies to Say’s stinkbug. Of those, ten are beetles including Ampedus sayi, an orange and black click beetle that LeConte named.
Could that be the LeConte of LeConte’s sparrow and LeConte’s thrasher? Indeed, it was. John Lawrence LeConte, who was born in 1825, was, according to Arnold Mallis in his excellent American Entomologists, “our greatest coleopterist, not because he named almost five thousand species of beetles, but because he showed their systematic relationships and pointed the way to the scientific classifications of American insects.”
John Le Conte (artist unknown, 1874)
Son of the naturalist Major John Eatton LeConte, who raised him when his mother died shortly after his birth, he learned about beetles at his father’s knee as a toddler while the major worked on his beetle collection. He was raised in New York City but moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was 27.
By then he had graduated from college, begun his travels to the West in search of insects and written several papers on ground, tiger, and long-horned beetles from the eastern United States. In 1859 he edited The Complete Writings of Thomas Say on the Entomology of North America and with his friend and pupil Dr. George H. Horn he wrote The Classification of the Coleoptera of North America in 1883, which was based on the 11,000 beetle species in LeConte’s and Horn’s collections. He was also the founder and president of the American Entomological Society.
Of the 36 insect species named for him that I found, almost all were beetles. One favorite exception of mine that lives on our mountain is the striking black and white LeConte’s haploa moth Haploa lecontei. Beetle species from Alaska to Texas, New Jersey to California bear his name—clown beetles, long-horned beetles, leaf beetles and, of course, a click beetle Elater lecontei.
LeConte did his fair share of naming too. The attractive hairy fungus beetle Mycetophagus melsheimeri is one of them. This brought me back to the very beginning of insect studies in North America because before Say and LeConte, there was Frederick Valentine Melsheimer, also called the Father of American Entomology. He was considered the first serious American entomologist because he made the first important insect collection and wrote the first important entomological work in the United States in 1806 entitled A Catalogue of Insects of Pennsylvania. Sixty pages long, it dealt only with 1,363 species of beetles of which about 400 are recognized today. His catalogue also included the habits, life histories and food plants of some of those insects as well as the oldest description of a beetle larva in North America.
Friedrich Valentine Melsheimer (artist unknown)
But Melsheimer was primarily a minister. Born in Germany in 1849, he was ordained a chaplain in a regiment of Hessian Dragoons. Shortly after he preached his first sermon, the Dragoons were sent to North America to fight for the British in the American Revolution. After landing in Quebec in 1776, they were sent south, captured at the Battle of Bennington, and imprisoned first in Massachusetts and then in New York. Finally, Melsheimer was sent in 1779 to Bethlehem, where he resigned his commission as chaplain, assumed several Lutheran congregations in Lancaster County and married a Bethlehem native. Over the decades he served in Manheim, New Holland, Lancaster, and Hanover.
In addition, he founded German-American schools and was a professor of German, Latin and Greek and one of the founders and the second president of Franklin College (now Franklin and Marshall College) in 1787. Of his eleven children, two sons followed his entomological interests. Johann Friedrich Melsheimer was an active insect collector, but he died and his brother, Dr. Franz Ernst Melsheimer, took over the collection and library. In 1842 he was elected the first president of the Entomological Society of Pennsylvania. From 1846 to 1848 he contributed seven papers on beetles to the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences and in 1853 he was elected president of the American Entomological Society. That same year the Smithsonian Institution published his Catalogue of the Described Coleoptera of the United States, which had been revised by Samuel Stehman Haldeman, still another early Pennsylvania entomologist who lived near Harrisburg, and LeConte. Altogether, his insect collection consisted of 14,000 specimens of 5,000 species.
I could not find nearly as many insects named for any of the Melsheimers. In fact, only five insects—one moth Cicinnus melsheimeri called Melsheimer’s sack-bearer moth–and four beetles. One, an antlike leaf beetle—Emelinus melsheimeri has a clear “M” on its back. And yes, one is a click beetle Zorochros melsheimeri. Perhaps that isn’t such a surprise because there are at least 9,300 known click beetle species worldwide and more to be named. And we all know the famous quote about beetles by British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles” because there are more beetle species than any other form of insects and comprise one fifth of all living species on earth.
An eyed elator click beetle from Plummer's Hollow (photo by D. Bonta)
Click beetles in the family Elateridae are able to click and jump when they are on their backs by bending their heads and prothoraxes backward and then their body is suddenly straightened, producing an audible click and propelling the beetle into the air and turning it right side up again. Their larvae are wireworms, a few of which are injurious to the roots of crops. The eyed elater click beetles, which I am most acquainted with, are found in the northeast and southeast United States and Ontario. The Semiotus genus occurs principally in tropical America from Mexico to Chile.
Dr. Wells began studying click beetles while in pursuit of his doctorate and says that despite their abundance little is known about them and much more taxonomic work needs to be done. He received the specimen he named for me from a colleague, Sergio Riese, in Italy, and it resides in the Bonta/Sam Wells personal insect collection in Fresno, California.
“Now,” Wells says, “All I have to do is go collect Semiotus marciae for myself.”
Marcia with golden eagle (photo by Todd Katzner)
Marcia Bonta is the author of nine books and over 300 magazine articles. The blog portion of this website includes her popular “Naturalist’s Eye” column from Pennsylvania Game News, reprinted here on the 1st of each month. Unlike typical blog entries, these columns are written months in advance, usually about things that happened during the previous year. Read more…
