Birthing and Banding
Spring and summer are indeed the seasons that embody rebirth and renewal in nature, especially with birds like our phoebes, robins, loons and eagles tending to their nests and chicks. What an exciting time!
Here at the homestead, we have been taken over by our phoebes and robins that have kept our ingress and egress into our own home to the very minimum, less we disturb our latest nesting residents! And now my better half just reminded me that phoebes can have two broods a season! So much for using the downstairs door for the next month!
Last week, our Colby Interns assisted technicians with Biodiversity Research Institute’s (BRI) Eagle’s Restoration Project in banding three Eaglets from Long Pond’s Pinewold Point’s eagle’s nest. The banding procedure is a necessary adjunct to collecting feather, blood, saliva, etc. samples to ascertain the effects of PFAS, mercury and other contaminants in our avian wildlife. On average, an eagle brood consists of one or two eaglets per year, if not three! Three put an incredible burden on the parents to feed these new teenagers — a very difficult task today but doable considering the overall health of our lakes due to our watershed efforts!
These eaglets — they are not laughing hyenas — were only seven to eight weeks old but already approximately 14″ tall! A BRI technician climbed this 200′ pine tree, captured each eaglet, and carefully lowered each to the ground. The technicians, assisted by loon interns Ari and Makena collected the necessary samples along with the banding.
Just yesterday, as I penned this article, Ari, Makena, and I were surveying Long Pond and discovered Long Pond’s first chicks of the year. We knew that this particular nest was in the hatch window but it was still an incredible experience to come across both new parents tending to their one-to-two-day-old children. A special time was had by all!
If you have questions regarding our Belgrade loon (or even our eagle) population, please email your inquiry to info@blamaine.org, and we will try to answer your question either in this column or via email. Have a great summer enjoying the Call of the Loon!
Dick Greenan is chairman of the Belgrade Lakes Association’s Loon Preservation Project.
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