Phone books

This past week I decided to give an old phone book to one of our resident eagles. He seemed to enjoy it!

Summer has arrived!

Its been a busy couple weeks! Here are a couple of my work highlights.

Tackle bags for the fishing for eagles program

The Fishing for Eagles program started up again this week. I am running the program this summer so I've had to check all the gear and get ready for the kiddos. Every Wednesday and Thursday through August, kids can go fishing on the public dock here Wabasha. We provide all the gear and the bait, they get the chance to catch some dinner for our bald eagles. They even get a free bag of tackle goodies just for participating! If you know any kids, send them my way :)

Now that school is out, the center is getting busy again. Our birds get to go outside each morning and its molting season. Some of the local wild birds have figured out the eagle feathers make good additions to their nests. The house sparrows in particular keep stealing the feathers the eagles drop before I can grab them. I think its a little funny that the non-native is not following the laws when it comes to feathers...

House Sparrow stealing eagle feathers - Harriet is not amused!

My training is still moving forward with Donald. In fact we got to go down to the beach for a little while to enjoy the weather. He did amazing!!! However, apparently he has been having busy nights as well because he keeps falling asleep in front of visitors :)

Donald and Harriet at the beach!

Donald catching a nap while the mew is full of people.....

SOAR

Donald and I teaching

I have a pretty cool job. Each year in March, The National Eagle Center hosts an event called SOAR with the Eagles. Special presenters and vendors are brought in each weekend and our staff does lots of live eagle programs with our residents. This weekend, the feature presentation was World Bird Sanctuary and their free flight bird show. We also had David Stokes with his reptiles and some fun artists. There is one weekend left, so if you are in the area stop by! Its a great time :)

Eurasian Eagle Owl flying over the audience (and about to hit me in the head with his equipment)

Got to meet the bird stars after the show: here is the wedge-tailed eagle from Australia. AWESOME bird! There are no vultures in Australia so this bird serves the role of vultures and eagles. It also has a crazy long tail and this individual was rather vocal for a booted eagle. As a bonus, I now have my photo with 4 species of eagle - only about 55 to go!!

I purchased this Eagle Totem drawing from Foxloft Studies - one of our vendors. I first came across this artist last year at the IAATE conference but didn't purchase anything. Glad I did this time!

Playing with a bull snake

ACNW Visit

My Audubon Center of the North Woods folks (see above) visited me last Sunday. I showed them the eagle center and went out to find some goldens. I had a blast!

A couple of them were SUPER sneaky and managed to hide a "gift" in my workspace. Since I am stuck with the tennis ball for the near future, I decided to put it to got use and let the eagles enjoy. Surprisingly, Donald interacted with it the most!

Was'aka and tennis ball

Donald investigating!

Bands

We had a dead eagle come into the center recently. What makes this eagle really special is that it was banded on both legs - it had both a federal band and a project band.

Certificate from the USGS for reporting the bands

Close up the bands

I reported the information to the federal bird banding laboratory of the USGS and got immediate results. The site told me all the information about this individual. Turns out it was banded in the UP of Michigan in 2000. I even got a little certificate. We cut the bands off the birds and are going to use them in education programs at work. We are also working on tracking down the folks that put the bands on the bird to see what the goal of the project was. Stay tuned!

Happy Valentines Day

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

Here is Angel investigating her gift - tidbits of food hidden in an egg carton, then wrapped in a festive red bow. She seemed to enjoy it as it was quickly shredded!!

Golden Eagle Success!

What do people that work with eagles do on their time off? Try to find more eagles of course! I went Golden Eagle-ing again last week with Katie. We drove around using a road map that had the spots where the eagles like to hang out highlighted. We also had several spotting scopes, binoculars, camera's, GPS units and field guides. We were determined to find some this time around.

And, SUCCESS!

My little car did great on the back roads - even with an inch or so of fresh snow :)

Katie and I right after we found our first golden of the day!!

Golden in flight - notice how it looks like there is no head? That is one way to tell the goldens from the bald eagles!

One of the goldens we found perched :)

SUCCESS!

It was a great day. In total we found 10 golden eagles! I am now alot better at spotting these birds and identifying them. I'm super happy that I found these birds before they head to northern Canada for breeding season! We also found bald eagles, crows (several mobs), turkey, cooper's hawk, red-tailed hawks and a good variety of song birds. A great day of birding all around!

In Search of Birds

Katie and I look through our scopes for Goldens

 A couple days ago, Katie (my co-worker) and I went on a search for golden eagles and albino red-tailed hawks. We even had a "map of awesomeness" of locations that we were likely to find them.

Bald Eagle

 We searched for over 6 hours and came up empty handed. We did find several hundred bald eagles, 30 red-tails, crows, turkeys, mallards and golden-eyes. At one point I even shook hands with a dead opossum. But we could not find the birds we set out to find. At least we had a great time along way!

Frosty Grass

LOVE! American Kestrel

Red-tailed Hawk (pale but no albino...)

Cute little creek we stumbled across

Eagles Everywhere!

Temperatures have been dropping and the backwaters of the Mississippi River are starting to freeze. That means EAGLES! And lots of them! Yesterday, the highlight of my day was watching all the eagles out on the river across from the center. Lots of action - eagles perched, flying, catching fish, stalking waterfowl and ice skating. Love it! And the numbers are only supposed to get better :)