In late March, Maia Edwards strapped on cross-country skis for the second time in her life near Chilkat Lake Road.
The 24-year-old researcher, who is originally from New Orleans, set off with a backpack full of three gray weatherproof audio recorders and glided over a footbridge across the Little Salmon River. After more than an hour of slogging through the wet snow, she and local naturalist Nick Szatkowski found a spot along the river that looked ideal: far enough away from any roads to pick up the sound of engines, and in a quick flowing area of the stream.
An American Dipper fluttered in the rocks nearby as Edwards strapped the recorder to a weathered tree stump that had been partially chewed off by a beaver.
The recorders were set up as a test for a research project that could provide a new way to measure the Chilkat Valley’s exceptional biological abundance through tracking the vocalizations of birds, rodents, and other wildlife.
It also represents a pivot for the organization for which Edwards serves as assistant director: the American Bald Eagle Foundation.
The foundation has added five board members over the last year that have emphasized the foundation’s role in conducting research to help its namesake species thrive. The foundation added the word “research” to its mission statement last November, and research-oriented board members like Heather Huson, the director of the Cornell Raptor Center.
“I think it wasn’t a long time coming,” said Sue Chasen, the ABEF’s board president about the new focus on research. “It should be more than another roadside attraction.”
Chasen said the group is looking to partner with local groups like the Takshanuk Watershed Council to work on science projects in the valley, and is hoping to revamp exhibits and host more science talks at the center. Mario Benassi, a board member and employee working on training an eagle, said the group will also take a more direct role in conservation issues.
“We’re gonna be advocating in a more direct kind of stance for bald eagle habitat and needs. That also means clean water and salmon,” he said.
The foundation was established in 1982 by businessman Dave Olerud, who saw not only the need to conserve the once-hunted species, but also saw an opportunity to make money from the image of the eagle.
New board members like falconer Benassi and Huson have pushed for foundation to capitalize on the abundant opportunities for research in the Chilkat Valley.
Edwards, who herself graduated from Cornell in 2023, is at the forefront of the foundation’s efforts. Two weeks after she first set up her recorders, Edwards was back at the foundation’s office with a curved monitor scrolling through hundreds of hours of audio spectrograms — visual representations of the frequencies of different sounds — to try to make out individual bird calls.
Distinct black bands rising and falling let her know the sounds were mostly likely from magpies. She suspected some of the calls were duets made between two individual magpies, something she said hadn’t been recorded before.
Eventually, she hopes to design and research a project that would deploy monitors around the Chilkat Valley to systematically monitor animal sounds that could measure abundance year-to-year or to measure the effects of human disturbance on animal abundance.
If she gets enough recordings, she could even train the software to recognize individual bird calls and create a count automatically, part of a burgeoning research technique in ecology made possible by artificial intelligence.
Huson, with the Cornell Raptor Center, said developing the study would be a boost for science in the valley.
“The more ways you can get population estimates, the closer we are to actually knowing what the population numbers are. It’s super important to have multiple ways,” she said.
The biological abundance survey is just one of the new ideas at the foundation. Benassi has been spending several hours each day training Bella, a 14-year-old, to perch on his arm. Bella will be the first bald eagle that will come out of its cage for public demonstrations.
Edwards is also scheming an underwater acoustic project that could potentially identify salmon streams in tributaries of the Chilkoot River, part of a novel field of fish acoustics.
Francis Juanes, a fisheries researcher at the University of Victoria, British Columbia,
said his team last year published the first ever academic paper identifying chinook, coho, and pink salmon sounds during spawning. He said his recordings showed that different salmon species make distinct sounds during spawning through air bubbles from their anus, something that artificial intelligence could eventually be trained to differentiate and count automatically.
“It’s a really new field in fresh water,” said Juanes, “We’re still only getting started.”