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What a great way to end 2005 and greet the New Year 2006! A few of my friends and I were doing a 2005 New Year's Eve day kayak paddle at Lake Bartlett. As the Verde River flow was high, we decided to paddle upstream (the north end of Bartlett), and in fact were able to paddle farther than we had been able to in the past.
We had pulled over on a sandbar for lunch break. We immediately spotted a perched bald eagle on a snag in a nearby wash. A few minutes later, another eagle circled overhead and landed on a rock promontory right above us and began calling. The eagle in the wash flew up to that rock. With binoculars, we could see a pile of sticks around the flat of the rock, with the eagles in the center — wow, we thought, possibly a nest! We took pictures of the area, wrote a description, and noted GPS coordinates.
I reported this possible nest to Tuk Jacobson of the Bald Eagle Field Projects. He did a flyover of the area and reported seeing the eagle pair and that indeed this was a new nest, still incomplete but in the process of being built. He thought this might be the pair of adult bald eagles that they had been following for two years without finding their nest.
In subsequent field monitoring by Tuk and his group, the pair did abandon that partial nest and moved upstream to build another nest which successfully fledged that year.
Claudia Kirscher volunteers in daily care as well as our education outreach program.
My fiancè, Greg and I were going for a little backpacking trip in Burro Creek. We were walking, enjoying, and looking around when we saw a beautiful bald eagle take off from a cottonwood snag and soar around. We looked at it for a while and realized he was not going away but staying in the area. It came to mind that there might be something else going on. So we backed off from where we were and continued observing. Sure enough, the eagle landed back in the same spot in the cottonwood snag. To look where the eagle was without disturbing him, we had to do a big detour to get around the location. Using our binoculars, we had the chance to observe him preening and chilling out just beside a gigantic stick nest located in the snag! The snag was located right beside a huge blue-colored pool of water that seems to be perennial. The eagle didn't seem bothered at all by our presence. The next day, when we came back, we made the same big detour to make sure we didn't disturb him again. An eagle was still present that day, although this time we did not get the same reaction. This eagle was really agitated and was calling relentlessly. He took off from the snag, flew around, and landed in the cliff nearby, only to take off again. All that happened really quickly. We didn't stay around because he was obviously very disturbed by our presence. Once we got far enough on the other side, he came back and landed right beside the nest. We believe we had encountered both adults since they had such different behaviors. A few days later, we contacted AZGFD to tell them our story. Within a few weeks, they confirmed it was a new active nest with two beautiful eggs in it! It was so exciting and personally rewarding to find such a beautiful thing as a new active bald eagle nest!
Melanie Banville is a biologist for Liberty's Research and Conservation department as well as a volunteer in the education outreach program.
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