A friendly rivalry exists on each side of the Connecticut.
Residents in the Green Mountain and Granite States love to compare the two.
But when it comes to nesting pairs of bald eagles, there’s no contest.
The Vermont Standard’s Kevin Forrest reports.
Bald eagles don't group themselves by state - but scientists who study them do. (Courtesy: Robert and Mila Anderson)
Chris Martin is a biologist with the New Hampshire Audubon Society.
He’s been working with bald eagles for about two decades.
And he downplays the difference between New Hampshire and Vermont.
Chris Martin - Bald Eagles don’t really recognize state boundaries in any way. And it’s biologists that end up tallying, or accounting from one state to the other.
In fact, Martin’s even helped Vermont biologists in their quest to bring the big bird back.
In the 1950s and 60s, rampant use of the pesticide DDT nearly wiped bald eagles out.
Since DDT was banned in the 1970s, many states have successfully restored breeding populations.
These days, about 6,000 nesting pairs live in the lower 48 states.
And last year bald eagles left the national endangered and threatened species list.
When Martin started his work, New Hampshire had only one nesting pair.
But he says last winter yielded record sightings.
And 15 pairs are now producing young,
Chris Martin - The cool thing about bald eagles is that they’re pretty easy to detect because they’re big and they’re obvious. They’re not like a red-eyed vireo hiding in the forest canopy, colored green just like the leaves. They stand out.
Bald Eagles settle in large trees overlooking bodies of water.
This gives them quick access to their mostly fish diet.
Currently about four or five nesting pairs live along the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River.
They range all the way from Pittsburg near the river’s source to the Massachusetts border where a pair has lived for about 10 years.
But for whatever reason, Vermont’s side of the river has attracted only one pair.
And they seem to have trouble making up their minds.
Forrest Hammond is a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.
Hammond - The bald eagles that we’ve been tracking for the past seven years have given us quite a roller coaster ride of excitement and frustration, I guess.
Since 2002, the pair has moved 12 miles from an inland pond in Springfield, Vermont to various spots along the Connecticut.
Twice, great horned owls stole their home.
And Predators and unusually cold weather have destroyed eggs.
At one point the tree holding their nest was blown down in a storm.
The pair showed up a few weeks ago back at the original pond site.
Biologists don’t like to name the exact location of nesting sites.
Forrest Hammond says they want to give the breeding birds a little privacy.
Hammond - The pond we’re at right now has a lot of shallow water with emergent vegetation, a lot of surface body area and there’s a lot of fish, a lot of rough fish—there’re carp and suckers, there’s bass as well as a river nearby with trout, and other nearby reservoirs as well.
The male eagle even showed up with a younger mate this year.
Both Martin from New Hampshire and Hammond from Vermont agree that the discrepancy between the number of the two state’s nesting pairs probably boils down to three words: location, location, location.
Chris Martin:
Chris Martin - I don’t consider 15 pairs a whole lot more than one or two when you put us in perspective with a state like Maine with multiple hundreds. (laughing) New Hampshire’s closer to Maine than Vermont is. And that may be the entire story right there.
Martin says that keeping down air pollution and limiting shoreline development should help the bald eagle population in both states.
Vermont’s Hammond points out there are many bald eagles in Vermont approaching the nesting age.
So even though we’ve been unsuccessful up to now, we’ve got a lot of pairs that are just about ready to start nesting and I fully expect within the next few years we’ll have multiple eagle pairs producing young in Vermont.
Hammond says that if all goes well, at least one new baby bald eagle will fly next year from the latest Vermont nest.
And when it does, it will have no idea what important role it has played in bolstering the bald eagle population on the Vermont side of the river.
For NHPR, this is Kevin Forrest
