WVU research assistant professor Todd Katzner explains the workings of a remote Northern West Virginia camera site baited with roadkill deer to lure wintering golden eagles.
PARSONS, W.Va. -- A long-term study of the eastern golden eagle's migratory patterns, designed to minimize collisions between eagles and wind turbine blades, is shedding new light on West Virginia's previously unknown role as the key winter range for the seldom-seen raptor.
"There appear to be more golden eagles wintering here than anywhere else," said Todd Katzner, a research assistant professor at West Virginia University and the study's principal investigator. "For golden eagles in the East, West Virginia seems to have key winter habitat."
The study, now in its fifth year, involves telemetry tracking of golden eagles and trying to identify genetic differences between the smaller eastern population of golden eagles - which likely numbers fewer than 2,000 -- and their much more abundant western cousins.
Thirty eastern golden eagles have been captured, rigged with miniature GPS gear that uses cell phone technology to pass along location data, and released into the wild, where their movements are monitored and recorded.
Meanwhile, researchers are studying DNA material from feathers and blood to learn differences between the eastern and western populations of golden eagles.
This year, motion-sensitive cameras are being used to get a better handle on the population and behavior of eastern golden eagles in their winter range. At more than 30 remote clearings baited with road-killed deer, golden eagles are being photographed and studied.
More than half the camera sites are in West Virginia, while the others are placed on mountain ridges in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
"We never knew there were so many were here until we started trapping them [for telemetry tracking] and seeing them show up on our trail camera photos," said Kieran O'Malley, district biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources in Romney.
"They're not just migrating through. The mountains of West Virginia and eastern Virginia are their main wintering grounds, and they are here in numbers that would surprise a lot of folks."
O'Malley said some motion-tripped remote camera images show as many as five golden eagles feeding on the deer carcasses used to draw them within camera range. "I've had three or four of them hover over me when I'm working at a trail camera site," he said.
Plans are in the works to develop recognition software at WVU that will aid researchers in identifying individual golden eagles from images downloaded from memory cards at baited trail-camera sites. The software will assist researchers in getting a more accurate census of wintering birds, by avoiding the counting of individual birds more than once. It also will help track the movement of individual birds through the study area.
In a conference room at the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station at Fernow Experimental Forest near Parsons, Katzner and Mary Beth Adams, a research soil scientist at Fernow, displayed downloaded images from trail cameras installed across the study area in the past few weeks.
The 30-plus remote camera sites are producing some unexpected wildlife scenes, including four and five golden eagles simultaneously feeding on the bait deer or lingering nearby, sometimes encircled by hungry ravens or crows. Seldom-seen mammals, such as fishers and eastern spotted skunk, have been photographed at the bait sites, along with coyotes, foxes, turkeys and bears. In one memorable nighttime scene, a skunk was shown spraying a raccoon that dared to interrupt its aged venison dinner.
Dozens of collaborators -- volunteer citizen scientists as well as personnel from state and federal agencies -- are maintaining the camera sites and keeping them baited with highway-harvested venison.
Before the study, golden eagles in West Virginia "had a near mythical status," O'Malley said. "They are documented just across the border in Highland County, Virginia, and over the years, we've picked up a few that had been injured or shot. They have been seldom-seen, since they tend to shy away from human activity and spend their winters here up on the ridge tops."
PARSONS, W.Va. -- A long-term study of the eastern golden eagle's migratory patterns, designed to minimize collisions between eagles and wind turbine blades, is shedding new light on West Virginia's previously unknown role as the key winter range for the seldom-seen raptor.
"There appear to be more golden eagles wintering here than anywhere else," said Todd Katzner, a research assistant professor at West Virginia University and the study's principal investigator. "For golden eagles in the East, West Virginia seems to have key winter habitat."
The study, now in its fifth year, involves telemetry tracking of golden eagles and trying to identify genetic differences between the smaller eastern population of golden eagles - which likely numbers fewer than 2,000 -- and their much more abundant western cousins.
Thirty eastern golden eagles have been captured, rigged with miniature GPS gear that uses cell phone technology to pass along location data, and released into the wild, where their movements are monitored and recorded.
Meanwhile, researchers are studying DNA material from feathers and blood to learn differences between the eastern and western populations of golden eagles.
This year, motion-sensitive cameras are being used to get a better handle on the population and behavior of eastern golden eagles in their winter range. At more than 30 remote clearings baited with road-killed deer, golden eagles are being photographed and studied.
More than half the camera sites are in West Virginia, while the others are placed on mountain ridges in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
"We never knew there were so many were here until we started trapping them [for telemetry tracking] and seeing them show up on our trail camera photos," said Kieran O'Malley, district biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources in Romney.
"They're not just migrating through. The mountains of West Virginia and eastern Virginia are their main wintering grounds, and they are here in numbers that would surprise a lot of folks."
O'Malley said some motion-tripped remote camera images show as many as five golden eagles feeding on the deer carcasses used to draw them within camera range. "I've had three or four of them hover over me when I'm working at a trail camera site," he said.
Plans are in the works to develop recognition software at WVU that will aid researchers in identifying individual golden eagles from images downloaded from memory cards at baited trail-camera sites. The software will assist researchers in getting a more accurate census of wintering birds, by avoiding the counting of individual birds more than once. It also will help track the movement of individual birds through the study area.
In a conference room at the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station at Fernow Experimental Forest near Parsons, Katzner and Mary Beth Adams, a research soil scientist at Fernow, displayed downloaded images from trail cameras installed across the study area in the past few weeks.
The 30-plus remote camera sites are producing some unexpected wildlife scenes, including four and five golden eagles simultaneously feeding on the bait deer or lingering nearby, sometimes encircled by hungry ravens or crows. Seldom-seen mammals, such as fishers and eastern spotted skunk, have been photographed at the bait sites, along with coyotes, foxes, turkeys and bears. In one memorable nighttime scene, a skunk was shown spraying a raccoon that dared to interrupt its aged venison dinner.
Dozens of collaborators -- volunteer citizen scientists as well as personnel from state and federal agencies -- are maintaining the camera sites and keeping them baited with highway-harvested venison.
Before the study, golden eagles in West Virginia "had a near mythical status," O'Malley said. "They are documented just across the border in Highland County, Virginia, and over the years, we've picked up a few that had been injured or shot. They have been seldom-seen, since they tend to shy away from human activity and spend their winters here up on the ridge tops."
While more than 30 pairs of bald eagles nest in West Virginia and 200 nesting pairs can be found in Pennsylvania, eastern golden eagles do not nest in the state, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. The north woods of Quebec, Labrador and north Ontario serve as their exclusive breeding grounds.
While golden eagles tend to favor open country for hunting prey while in their northern breeding grounds, when in their West Virginia wintering zone, they appear to favor steep, densely forested hillsides.
"They seem to want to get away from people and take advantage of the dramatic increase in the deer population that's happened in this area in the past 40 or 50 years," Katzner said.
While golden eagles are efficient hunters, they are also known to dine on carrion.
"In the winter, there's an abundance of roadkill and winterkill deer," Katzner said. "Venison that doesn't move is a lot easier to feed on."
Unlike bald eagles, which usually live near water because they feed primarily on fish and waterfowl, golden eagles prefer upland terrain, where they feed on such prey as rabbits, grouse and turkeys. Mature bald eagles have a distinctive white head and tail and a yellow bill, while golden eagles have dark tails, yellow feathers on the back of the head and a grayish bill. Bald eagles are much more plentiful than goldens in the east.
While the golden eagle's eastern population is believed to number between 1,000 and 2,000, there are an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 golden eagles in the west, not counting Canada or Alaska.
When eastern golden eagles migrate, they follow the higher and longer ridges of the Appalachians, where they can ride thermal updrafts along with hawks, ospreys, bald eagles and a variety of smaller migrants.
By charting the path and flight elevation of golden eagles as they migrate through the Central Appalachians, now in the midst of a wind-energy boom, Katzner, O'Malley and their collaborators hope to mitigate the risk the eagles face from deadly encounters with wind turbine blades. A number of other migrating raptors that follow the route of the golden eagle, including broad-wing and red-tailed hawks, also should benefit from the research, Katz-ner said.
In California's Altamont Pass, where more than 5,000 wind turbines are operating, up to 116 golden eagles and 1,000 other birds of prey are killed annually by turbine blade strikes, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
While wind-energy development in West Virginia is not likely to approach that intensity, careful siting of wind turbines can dramatically minimize raptor deaths, according to Katzner.
"The goal is to develop a risk map, which would be able to predict high- and low-risk spots for building wind turbines," Katzner said. "A distance of just a couple of hundred meters might make a big difference in reducing fatalities.
"We're looking for solutions that are good for wildlife and cost-effective for industry. If it's done right, wind energy and golden eagles should both have a future here."
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelham...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5169.
