Dr. Bill Bowerman is Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Maryland. He’s worked throughout the northeastern U.S. and in Michigan counties tagging and studying bald eagles.
“Today’s a special day. We have a chance to do our normal band day work at a nest site in Ottawa County. The second purpose today is to translocate a nestling that was in a nest that got destroyed by a tornado on Thursday.”
The 7 to 8-week-old eaglet was found in Reese, Michigan, in Saginaw County. Its sibling did not survive and a parent couldn’t be located, so the nestling is being introduced to the Crockery Creek nest, which already contains three eaglets around the same age. But will the parental eagles accept the new guest?
“We’ve been doing this for probably 50 years, and we haven’t had a failure yet. The adults have a very, very good instinct to feed anything that has an open mouth.”
Once all the eaglets have been tagged and blood and feather samples are collected, they’re returned to their nest, where they’ll live for another month before setting off on their own.
