By Tom Morphet
For nearly 20 years, bald eagles were counted each fall – and
often twice – by a federal biologist surveying the Chilkat and Chilkoot drainages and
side valleys for hours from a special, low-flying airplane.
Eagle counts were a big drawing card in the early days of the Alaska
Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, before there was a local eagle festival, when Haines was just
beginning to use the fall migration of eagles as shoulder season tourist attraction.
Besides the number of birds in the valley, biologists reported where
numbers were concentrated and ventured to explain what other factors, such as weather and
the size of fish runs, influenced the migration over months or years. They also made other
observations of interest, such as the numbers of wintering trumpeter swans in the valley.
Federal budget cuts ended aerial counts about seven years ago, and now
the job of counting eagles has fallen to state park ranger Joel Telford, who makes his
tally from five pullouts along the Haines Highway, when he can squeeze the job in amid
other duties as chief ranger for Southeast.
Telford will make his first count this week. His efforts are no
substitute for what can be seen from a plane, he said, but they do help visitors who want
to know what they can see west of 19 Mile. "Without an aerial survey, (a count
number) is probably meaningless."
With no official numbers, eagle preserve tour operator Dan Egolf has
taken to telling his clients there are between 2,000 and 3,500 eagles in the valley most
years during the mid-November peak.
A tour operator for 22 years, Egolf is somewhat concerned the aerial
surveys stopped, and suggested a graduate student might work up a correlation between
historic ground counts and aerial counts so a rough total count might be extrapolated each
year. "It would be interesting just from the standpoint of monitoring a species of we
want to keep track of."
The Audubon Christmas bird count provides one index of eagles, but
Egolf said he’d at least like to see occasional aerial surveys. "It’s
important to keep the eagles as a gauge of our fisheries and habitat. Ground counts can do
that, but they’re not as accurate or exciting as doing them from the air."
Aerial surveys also helped with bragging rights when a town in British
Columbia claimed the world’s largest gathering of birds. In the absence of hard
numbers, it’s legitimate to call the Haines gathering the "largest
congregation" of bald eagles in the world, Egolf said.
"In British Columbia, they’re spread out all over the place.
A couple years ago, I spotted 1,900 eagles here from one spot."
Phil Schempf heads up eagle studies in Southeast for the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, the agency that conducted the aerial counts. It’s difficult to say
what of scientific value is being lost by the discontinuation of the counts, he said.
Even with aerial counts, the numbers of birds here ebbed and waned
during the fall months, making the number on a given day perhaps not indicative of the
entire migration.
"I suspect the (total) numbers are staying fairly consistent but
they vary year to year depending on the type of winter you’re having and a lot of
other variables besides the raw number of eagles," Schempf said.
A drop in temperatures early this week should favor eagle watchers,
Egolf said. Cold – but not bitter cold – tends to freeze eagles out of food from
other sources, forcing them to gather at the preserve’s council grounds, where they
compete for food, usually creating good photo opportunities.
The highest aerial count of eagles came in 1984 – 3,988. One of
the last counts, in 2000, found 3,444.
Visitors in town this week to watch eagles include schoolchildren from
Juneau and Whitehorse and a photographer making a film on eagles for PBS featuring local
eagles and ones along the Mississippi River.
