A'Kweks (Eagles) in Akwesasne

From the Department of Environment

For the past weeks at least 2 different Bald Eagles have been seen on Kawehno:ke along the St. Lawrence River in the parts that are not frozen. They have been seen in the Harbor Road area and by the river across from Buster Benedict’s and in the Snye area. We have had reports of eagle sightings from other areas in Akwesasne. It always gets people excited to spot an eagle.

Bud Andress was the co-chair of the former St. Lawrence Bald Eagle Working Group (now called the Raptor Working Group of Eastern Lake Ontario and the Upper St. Lawrence River) and has been for many years working with his counterpart from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. They placed satellite transmitters on juvenile bald eagles and at present have 1 (Hal) with an active transmitter. You can track Hal’s movement on your computer. Hal is a juvenile and will not get the white head or tail until the 2013 season. Hal is presently just east of Oswego, NY along the shores of Lake Ontario. In 2010 Hal has done some extensive traveling; he was in the New York City area on March 7th and up north as far as Temiscaming May 14th. Hal spent a lot of time in the Ottawa-Renfrew area and along the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Take a look at the tracking map and you can single out Hal and select 2010. Two other birds tracked for four years from the Thousand Islands area were Spirit and Phyllis. These two female siblings traveled (albeit separately) from James Bay to Labrador to West Virginia and everywhere in between while developing to adulthood.

According to Bud Andress, the eagles that we are seeing here usually spend most of their time way up north; this could become their winter home. They like a place with some open water where they can catch fish and waterfowl and unoccupied land where they take advantage of carrion.

There is also a report called the Eagle Watch Update that can be seen at the following web site: http://www.bsc-eoc.org or at

thousandislandslife.com/eaglewatch that will open a page where you will find the site for Birds Study Canada or “BSC Site Search” near the left margin, half way down. Type in destination eagle, from there you will see a site that says eagle tracker. Open that site and that opens up a map that shows the latest destination of the eagles being tracked. There is also a place that you may make comments that will be printed on their site.

In the past Bald Eagles have suffered a major blow to their populations from the over 2000 chemicals that were dumped into the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. A ban on the dumping of most of these chemicals has had good results. Loss of suitable habitat in the Great Lakes region also took its toll. In our area, Bald Eagles were completely gone; in the 1980s have rebounded to a slow growing population today.

From their site Bud Andress writes, “An indication of the successfulness of recovery efforts for this species came in 2009 when the status of the Bald Eagle in southern Ontario was changed from Endangered to Special Concern. This is a great victory for a bird that was nearly lost from southern Ontario, although monitoring remains an important task to ensure that this positive trend continues.”

We now have to do our part and the best way of doing that is to leave them alone. You can get good pictures with a good zoom lens, that way you don’t have to get too close to them. Please feel free to contact Richard David, Department of Environment at 613 9361548 or email him at [email protected]