Lotta Big Birds

My first job out of college was to maintain a lab for a university prof. One of the projects he (Sam) had his graduate student Allen and me construct was a floating aquatic sampling machine – basically a boat containing sampling and power machines plus collection containers. Upon completion of assembly, Sam told us to take it out on Newnans Lake the following morning and test all the equipment to see if the sampling system worked.

Allen had an early class so we met at the boat ramp at dark-thirty. Stars were still out and it was bitter cold, as a polar front had come through earlier that night. We gamely did our do on the foggy waters, circling the lake and sampling here and there. As the dawn slowly lightened, before sunup even, we gradually became aware that the perimeter ring of mature cypress trees held a bunch of big black birds. We couldn’t make out what they were for the longest time, so we assumed they were vultures as vultures are wont to mass up at night. But as the sun did rise up over the horizon and we got a good look at the birds, we could see that each and every one of them had a white head and a white tail. Using the best principles of wildlife management that I could muster, I counted all the eagles within a pie-shaped slice of the lake and multiplied out the number for the entire lake. My conservative estimate was in excess of 400. They had evidently migrated south before the cold front.

This was during the winter of 1971-72, during the middle of the multi-decadal DDT Winter, when there were estimated to be only about 1000 bald eagles in the entire coterminous United States. Is it possible that Allen and I were looking at nearly the entire population of the Atlantic Seaboard’s Bald Eagles that morning?