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| An unsuspecting visitor -- a mature bald eagle -- gets caught by a motion camera on Standing Rush's West Marsh. |
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| One more branch to the treetops. A baldy adding to its nest in early spring. |
After all this discussion of nasty invading plants, it seems fitting to throttle back a bit on a Sunday and focus on some of the good news coming from the marsh. What better way than to highlight the iconic and always majestic bald eagle? This particular individual paid a visit to one of our motion cameras on the fringe of the West Marsh. We leave a couple cameras up more-or-less full-time for this very reason -- one never knows who might pay a visit, day or night!
The resolution of the first image soon after he arrived is definitely an eye-catcher. But what is so neat about the second image is that it captures an instant in the behavior life of an adult eagle in early spring. Note how this bird has picked up a fairly large (~1.5" diameter) willow branch to take back to its nearby nest.
Eagles are the largest nest builders in the United States. Their treetop roosts are typically situated in one of the largest trees in a local landscape, and considering they can grow to 1-3 tons in broken branch biomass (4-5' in diameter, on average), they are usually not hard to pick out. The National Eagle Center offers more interesting facts related to eagle nesting and breeding.
Standing Rush is fortunate enough to have several nesting pairs in immediate proximity (the closest being on our southern-most property line). To put this in perspective, these resident birds are equivalent to the entire statewide population in Ohio at its low watermark (in the early 1980s). When the bald eagle was listed on the Endangered Species List (1963), there were 400 nesting pairs in the Lower 48. When the eagle was delisted in 2007, that number had climbed to more than 10,000 nests. This is most certainly a success story, and it provides an entree to speak to the broader need for the Endangered Species Act (legislation that benefits way more than the individual species on a list). More on that later.
Because of our site's orientation relative to Sandusky Bay, and because much of our 3/4-mile+ of shoreline is dotted with hulking cottonwood trees, it is not uncommon for literally dozens of eagles to be in the marsh at any given time. In fact, a highlight of one of my first visits to the property offered the rare opportunity to witness a shoreline flyby by more than 60 adult and juvenile eagles.
As an aside, seeing the limb being hoisted skyward is a good motivator and reminder as to why we are working to reforest not just the six acres of what was mostly dead ash trees (see 3/21/17 post), but also another eight acres of what has been a hay field for more than fifty years. Canopy trees are in short supply along many stretches of the lakeshore, and species like the bald eagle benefit from reforestation, particularly of desirable hardwoods.
And as a brother of mine often says, "Who could get tired of seeing eagles?"