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)
* * *
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.
Hiking the Bells Gap Rail Trail
On the last day of October, twenty friends and members of the Juniata Valley Audubon Society hiked down the Allegheny Front beginning in State Gamelands 158, following the remains of the Bells Gap Narrow-Gauge Railroad. Back in 1872, it was built from the railroad station in the Logan Valley town of Bellwood to Lloydsville, nine miles uphill, to haul coal from the mines on the mountain summit down to the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
It also served as an excursion train for summer tourists, “on account of the grand and romantic scenery along its course, its mountain peaks, deep gorges, cuts and windings,” according to an Altoona journalist writing for a Pittsburgh journal, as quoted by J. Simpson Africa in his 1883 History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania. He had seen the “wilder gorges in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but nothing to compare with this in softness of beauty, graceful outlines, and richness of foliage.”
The cars, he wrote, were pushed up the mountain by a locomotive but descended using gravity and brakes. For a round-trip ticket, tourists paid the train company a mere 65 cents.
ca. 1875, from a series of stereoscopic "Views among the Alleghenies: Penna. Railroad" by R. A. Bonine
Near the top they alighted from the train at extensive picnic grounds containing walks, rustic seats, and a large covered pavilion called Rhododendron Hall “on account of the abundance of this flowering shrub on the mountain. There is a large bubbling spring of living water on the grounds, which is pure and cold,” as well as a pond and fountain. “These beautiful grounds are situated in the heart of a primeval forest, and beneath the umbrageous shade of widespreading hemlocks, oak, beech… Ferns and laurel abound…”
Over the years, the forest primeval was logged and the lumber hauled down to the valley railroad. The pure, cold, living water was heavily polluted by the mining operation.
Today it doesn’t cost anyone to hike, bike, or ride a horse up or down this railroad bed, now known as the Bells Gap Rail Trail. And while the forest primeval is gone, an extensive secondary forest covers the slopes as it did back in 1872. Rhododendrons still abound and so do oaks, beeches, and hemlocks along with many other tree species including mountain maple.
view of Bellwood reservoir and Brush Mountain
Indeed, even the view at Point Lookout, which the journalist described, hasn’t changed much — “bounded on either side by graceful mountains, clothed from base to summit with dark-green foliage, and away beyond for six miles the view is exceedingly fine, until it is shut out by Brush Mountain [the westernmost ridge in the ridge-and-valley province where I live], which rises like an immense green curtain to form the background of the picture.” With most of the leaves off the trees during our hike, the lookout also included a view of the Bellwood Reservoir, which is like a blue eye in the extensive forest.
The four mile portion through the gamelands is a wide, grassy trail, and the descent is barely perceptible because the engineers who designed the railroad kept the grade at less than four percent.
Almost immediately, on the left of the trail, we reached a series of four ponds called the Lloydsville Run Site A/B Passive Treatment System designed to neutralize acid mine drainage in Lloydsville Run, which had been affected by both strip mining and deep mining coal extraction. Altogether, it covers seven acres and includes an anoxic limestone drain, a limestone vertical flow pond, sediment ponds, and aerobic and anaerobic wetlands. Finished in 2001 by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, its partners in restoration included the Altoona Water Authority and the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement (EAST). Although the EAST is now disbanded locally, many of the same volunteers continue to monitor the watershed.
staghorn sumac at the AMD remediation ponds
A Growing Greener grant of $337,515 and a further $166,455 from the United States Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining’s Clean Streams Initiative paid for its construction. I find it ironic that industry made the mess and took the profits over a century ago and that citizens today not only had to pay to clean it up through their taxes, but volunteered to monitor it. However, the investment was worth it because in 2000 its pH level was an acidic 4.1. By 2007 it had risen to 6.92. In addition, its concentrations of heavy metals had dropped significantly.
Our fellow hikers poked about at the edges of the ponds and found newts and tadpoles in them. Last spring, on a Mother’s Day hike with my husband Bruce, the wetland area was alive with singing red-winged blackbirds.
Soon we reached a series of calcareous sandstone outcrops probably formed when the workers cut into the mountain to build the railroad. While the bed itself is wide, we could always peer down the steep slopes to the right at forest below. On the left, the mountain also rises, and it is there that the outcrops overhang the trail, some more dramatically than others.
columbine on the cliffs next to the trail
Blossoming witch hazel, wild hydrangea shrubs, Hercules’ club, and common nightshade covered with red berries hung from the outcrops, and we wondered what other treasures we might find there in spring. On Mother’s day columbine, early saxifrage, Canada violets and Solomon’s seal bloomed on the outcrops, and we also saw doll’s eyes or white baneberry plants. Red-berried elder shrubs grew on and next to the outcrops.
Banks and banks of rhododendron often lined the trail and grew in thickets below the trail too. Large and small hemlocks looked healthy, because the hemlock woolly adelgids haven’t reached them. Clumps of paper birch signaled the colder climate atop the Allegheny Front.
Probably the most exciting find on our October hike was a porcupine in a tree. Many of the hikers had never seen one before, and it starred in several photos by the photographers in the group.
After four miles in the gamelands, we crossed on to the 2.1 miles managed by volunteers of the Bells Gap Rail Trail who keep it mowed under the direction of 87-year-old Bud Amrhein.
“He’s wonderful. I don’t know what we’d do without him,” Hazel Bilka told me.
porcupine along the Bells Gap Rail Trail
It was due to Bilka and a group of concerned Bellwood citizens back in the mid-1990s that the rail trail was developed. That group called itself the Bellwood Antis Community Trust and, in an effort to promote the area, surveyed the citizens in Bellwood and the surrounding township and asked them what the area needed. Overwhelmingly, the citizens wanted more recreational opportunities.
After raising money for a feasibility study to develop a Bells Gap Rail Trail, they were able to persuade major landowners, including the Altoona Water Authority and township supervisors, to turn over their property along the railroad. They then received funding for the work on their 2.1 miles from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. On July 8, 2007 the trail, beginning at Root’s Crossing outside Bellwood was officially opened to the public, and later was connected to the gamelands. A further spur of it down into Bellwood is shared with cars and trucks.
“I think it makes the area accessible to those who otherwise wouldn’t go up there,” Bilka says. “I hear from people all the time who tell me how much they like it.”
In addition to biking, hiking, and horseback riding, Bilka says that cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are popular winter activities on the trail.
cinnamon ferns in a wetland below the trail
But I was eager to do a spring hike with Bruce, who hadn’t been on the October hike, and Mother’s Day was ideal. We parked at the top of the mountain in a gamelands pull-off and were immediately welcomed by singing chestnut-sided warblers, American redstarts, and ovenbirds. Eastern towhees, black-and-white warblers, dark-eyed-juncos, wood thrushes, common yellowthroats, black-throated green warblers, blue-headed vireos, scarlet tanagers, worm-eating warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, black-throated blue warblers and common ravens sang and called along the trail and below in the forest during our six mile hike.
At 2,160 feet in elevation and 1,107 feet above Bellwood at the start of the trail, the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers were at least a week behind our mountain at 1200 feet and even further behind the fully leafed-out trees in Bellwood. Shadbush and red-berried elder bloomed and golden catkins dangling from black birch trees lit up the forest.
On the trail itself we stepped carefully to avoid beds of purple, sweet white and Canada violets as well as wild strawberry flowers. Along its edges, mayapples, columbine, and long-spurred violets blossomed, and once we found a cluster of eight blooming jack-in-the-pulpits.
At the magnificent curve over Shaw Run, known as the Horseshoe Bend in the railroad days, where the train had crossed on a trestle 76 feet high, we walked down to the rushing stream and followed a deer path upstream to eat our trail lunch in a bed of foamflowers and cut-leaved toothworts beside the picturesque run.
dolls' eyes (white baneberry) are common along the trail
Behind us loomed the Shaw Run outcrop, a calcareous opening/cliff natural community which, according to the Blair County Natural Heritage Inventory, hosts limestone cliff specialties such as walking fern, maidenhair spleenwort, fragile fern, purple cliff brake, wild ginger, and bishop’s cap, although we did not climb it to find out.
On our way back to our car, we watched common sulphurs and blue azure butterflies fluttering over the wildflowers on the trail.
During our five hours there we never encountered another person. And we scarcely noticed the gentle incline.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter — the Bells Gap Rail Trail is a trail for all seasons.
All photos (except for the historical one) are by Dave Bonta. See his complete set of Bells Gap Rail Trail photos on Flickr.
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…
