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Saturday, Mar. 21, 2009

Georgia DNR manager follows eagle numbers from the sky

As the helicopter puttered toward a great nest of sticks in a towering pine, a bald eagle glided by on the same plane, wings frozen extended as it rode a current of air. Its mate sat near the nest, where a frowzy gray blob was visible.

Inside the helicopter Jim Ozier, a manager in the state Department of Natural Resources’ nongame wildlife section, craned his neck.

“You think that was one chick or two?” he asked Boyd Clines, a retired pilot with an eagle eye who sometimes helps Ozier check the nests.

They can’t be sure. So they circle the nest on Lake Tchukolaho in Washington County again. One chick, they decide.

Ozier has been tracking Georgia’s bald eagle population for several decades, watching its rise from just one or two nesting pairs in the early 1980s to 112 last year. Each January, he checks known nests. Then in March, he checks again to see which have chicks. It takes four days to fly by helicopter over all the likely nesting spots in the state.

Wednesday was his third day in the air for the chick count, and he headed from Douglas and Tifton over Macon, Houston, Bibb, Monroe and Washington on his search. Altogether, he counted 17 nests and 20 young birds.

That’s a conservative estimate. Some empty nests might have been vacated by chicks that have grown up and flown away, a process that takes about 12 weeks. But Ozier only counts the birds he sees. Some are only a few weeks old, others ready to fly.

Next week, Ozier will check nearby lakes such as Oconee and Sinclair as well as northeast Georgia. But based on what he’s seen so far, this year is yielding an average crop of chicks and nesting pairs.

He’s hopeful there will be a few more nesting pairs than last year, when there were 114. Incremental growth has been typical in recent years, a far cry from the days when the DNR biologists had to release eagle chicks themselves in order to grow the population.

Many young eagles may fly north to the Great Lakes for the summer, but they generally return to their old nesting grounds in the fall, Ozier said. If Mom and Dad are still using the old homeplace, the older birds will run the young ones off to find new territories.

Many nests have remained occupied for decades, Ozier said. Bald eagles mate for life.

“Sometimes the nests get so big, we call ’em condos,” Clines said.

GREAT HABITATS

From the air, Ozier uses a hand-held global positioning device to track nest locations. He has received many reports of eagle sightings at Houston Lake and Lake Tobesofkee in the past year, so he checked Houston Lake on Wednesday and Lake Tobesofkee in January. They both have great eagle habitats, he said, but he spied no nests.

Ozier chose not to fly over the new nest at the Dodge County Public Fishing Area because he’d already confirmed it from the ground. It’s one of six or seven new nests found so far this year, he said.

The helicopter continued its trek north, flying over Bond Swamp outside Macon to check the nest there. The large nests are located just under the crowns of pine trees that tower over the surrounding hardwoods. There are only three pines in this spot, making the nest easier to see despite the sun’s bright glint on water standing beneath the trees.

“In places like this, eagles tend to focus on the pine trees because those are the only ones with limbs big enough to hold them,” Ozier said. He estimated that bald eagles usually build their nests 60 feet up or higher.

That nest was empty, although Ozier saw adult eagles there in January.

Ozier scanned the trees nearby looking for a young eagle, and thought he glimpsed one. It turned out to be a vulture.

He kept looking as the helicopter spun low over the brick ponds south of Macon, a good hunting ground for eagles. The city’s landfill towered on the left. “Sometimes eagles learn to scavenge at landfills,” he noted.

The helicopter moved on. After checking the nest at Lake Tchukolaho, the quest headed back toward Dames Ferry in Monroe County.

There, a few feet from the swollen Ocmulgee River, an eagle perched at the edge of its nest. Its striking white head twitched to the left and right, following the strange intruder in the sky. It hunched forward, extending huge wings for a moment. Another gray chick huddled near its feet.

A few hundred feet away, a home is being built. Ozier said the people came before the eagles in this case. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act puts some limits on new development near nests, but it often allows people to live fairly close if the house isn’t large and the nest is somewhat screened from human activity, Ozier said. In some cases, the eagles don’t even seem to care.

This is the second nest in the area. Probably the same pair of eagles moved when they abandoned a nest at Lake Juliette, Ozier said. The helicopter spun briefly over the lake checking for more.

On a tip of land shaped a bit like an eagle’s head, Ozier saw another tangle of sticks high in a living tree. The helicopter circled for a closer look. But the nest, a bit smaller than most eagles’, was home to an osprey instead. Because they are dark with a white head, ospreys are often mistaken for bald eagles, Ozier said.

Nevertheless, a growing number of Georgia bald eagle sightings are the real deal. Steps such as banning the pesticide DDT, which weakened eagle shells, have helped them recover across the country. In 2007, the bald eagle became one of the few animals ever removed from the federal Endangered Species List.

The delisting hasn’t changed Georgia’s approach, Ozier said. The state still tracks eagle numbers and helps resolve conflicts between the birds and humans.

“The eagle is a success story through lots of work,” Ozier said. “We’ve gotten it to a good point now, but there are lots of other species that need a lot of attention to keep them from disappearing.”