Final - Bald Eagle and DDT podcast.mp3

Transcript

00:00:17 Liz Anderson

Hi, welcome to Naturally Speaking. A podcast by Nature of North, I'm Liz and I'll be your host for this podcast. The blight on bald eagles.

00:00:34 Liz Anderson

Today, we're going to be talking about the impact of the pesticide DDT on bald eagles in New York State and the conservation success story that followed their near complete population loss in New York. Along the way, I've asked some people to describe the time that they saw a bald eagle and what that experience was like for them.

00:00:53 Liz Anderson

I'll start with my own story of seeing bald eagles. A couple times come to mind. For me, first of all, I've seen more bald eagles during my last three years here in the North Country than I ever did before. Maybe I just didn't know where to look back home in Massachusetts, but seeing all the Eagles here definitely makes the North Country special for me.

00:01:12 Liz Anderson

The main encounter that stands out for me is from my ecology class my sophomore spring semester. We visited a bald eagle nest site located in the tree line across the field. We pulled over on the side of the road which, side note, sides of roads are often rich with bird sightings and set up our spotting scope. Though the nest was heavily obscured with pine needles, we could see the parents head in the nest this year with my Ornithology class. We went back to the same nest and we were able to see the Eagles again.

00:01:40 Liz Anderson

I also found it special the amount of eagles that I saw during my Ornithology class this semester. Almost every lab we saw at least 1 Bald eagle. To see this many Eagles makes the story I'm about to share, especially impactful to me and hopefully to you as well.

00:01:55 Liz Anderson

DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, was developed by Paul Herman Mueller in 1939 for use in World War Two against malaria carrying insects. Mueller won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. In 1945, DDT first became available for public use, and it was used everywhere. There's videos of it being sprayed on children, sprayed wide scale on agricultural fields and forests, and use in homes.

00:02:27 Liz Anderson

Now you can't talk about DT without talking about Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson wrote silent Spring and published it in 1962. The book was inspired by the amount of dead birds that she and other people had observed as a result of the spraying of DDT. The book was really popular and it raised public awareness about environmental concerns and human health concerns related to the use of DDT. The book also kickstarted the modern environmental movement, and it showed the power of popular media to inspire and create change on a wide scale level.

00:03:03 Liz Anderson

Carson's writing is not strictly scientific. It is easy for anyone to follow, understand, and enjoy, regardless of their scientific background. This allowed the book to gain the reach and traction than it did when it was published. Carson was both a writer and a scientist, so while her book was not in technical terms or dry language, she had indisputable research to back up her claims and counter the attacks that came from big pesticide production companies like Monsanto.

00:03:31 Liz Anderson

Rachel Carson passed away from breast cancer in 1964, but her legacy remained strong. I read Silent Spring in one of my classes at Saint Lawrence my freshman year. If you haven't read the book, you may be wondering why it's called Silent Spring, because DDT indiscriminately kills insects, its continued use would lead to the death of many insects and animals further up the food chain, like birds who either rely on insect populations for food or eat fish to have DDT concentrated in their bodies.

00:04:01 Liz Anderson

We'll get more into that process later. This would silence the noises of nature that are so characteristic of spring-time when birds migrate back to the area and fill the air with their songs. So, Carson's book serves as a warning of what would happen if DDT use continued at the level that it was.

00:04:20 Liz Anderson

Carson's warning was listened to, and in 1971 New York State banned the use of DDT, a year before the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, followed suit with the national ban in 1972.

00:04:35 Liz Anderson

DDT is still used today in African countries that have a high malaria risk as the benefits of malaria control outweigh the costs. This use is supported by the World Health Organization and follows the exception outlined in the Stockholm Convention on POP's, which are persistent organic pollutants in 2001. This convention resulted in a treaty between countries to enact a global ban on POP's, including DDT.

00:05:04 Liz Anderson

DDT has health consequences in humans as well as in the environment and wildlife. In this podcast, I'm going to focus on the wildlife, narrowing it down to birds, and then zooming it even further to focus on bald eagles. First, here are two terms you should know.

00:05:21 Liz Anderson

Bioaccumulation is the process where a substance builds up in an individual organism’s tissues over time, because it builds up faster than it can be metabolized and excreted.

00:05:33 Liz Anderson

Biomagnification is the accumulated toxin being passed up the food chain and its concentration and impact growing stronger the further up it goes.

00:05:44 Liz Anderson

Persistent organic pollutants, which DDT falls into the category of, are of particular concern with these two processes. DDT does not breakdown easily in the environment. Instead, it builds up and remains in the fatty tissues of animals very easily. This means that DDT becomes widespread through an ecosystem and the food chain very rapidly, which has wide consequences on ecosystem function.

00:06:11 Liz Anderson

This is what happened with bald eagles.

00:06:18 Liz Anderson

Wait, what's a red tailed hawk doing a podcast about bald eagles? There's a nature nugget for you. The call that is frequently used in media and films to represent the bald eagle is actually a red tailed hawk, a bald eagle call sounds like this.

00:06:48 Liz Anderson

Can you see why they might have decided to falsely advertise with the Hawk call? I guess it sounds more majestic and powerful? The more you know.

00:06:57 Liz Anderson

Now back to bald eagles and DT.

00:07:01 Liz Anderson

As DDT was sprayed on agricultural fields, it ran off into nearby waterways and remained in those waterways. It was uptaken by aquatic plants and fish and continued up the aquatic food web. Bald eagles eat fish, but in doing so, they are unknowingly poisoning themselves.

00:07:19 Liz Anderson

DDT impacted the bald eagles eggshell quality, so their egg shells were so thin that they would crack when the eagle parents tried to incubate the eggs, thereby halting the development of the egg and lowering the reproductive success of eagles to near 0. As this continued while the eagle populations declined so much that by 1976, there was only one pair of nesting eagles in New York State.

00:07:43 Liz Anderson

Even though the DDT was banned, it was still present in the ecosystem and in the eagles themselves.

00:07:49 Liz Anderson

The fact that there is only one pair of nesting bald eagles in the state was an issue, and the New York State DEC began their bald Eagle restoration program in 1976 to try to bring back this population. As the bald eagles in New York State weren't able to successfully hatch their own eggs because of the egg shell being too thin, biologists decided to bring in young eagles from other states to be hacked or to be fostered by established pairs.

00:08:19 Liz Anderson

In this context, hacking is the process of humans hand-rearing a young eagle until it reaches independence and can fly, hunt, and defend itself.

00:08:29 Liz Anderson

This was done with as little human interference and impact as possible, so that the eagles would remain wild and fear humans. Researchers used an artificial nesting platform and blinds to hide themselves as they cared for the young eagles until they were ready to fledge the nest at about 12 to 13 weeks old.

00:08:46 Liz Anderson

Hacking was done at the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge, a site that was found to be free of DDT.

00:08:52 Liz Anderson

23 young eagles were successfully hacked and released. The other method implemented in the program was fostering. The one remaining established eagle pair was trying but failing to hatch eggs due to the DDT bioaccumulation. So instead, the researcher just gave them an artificial egg to incubate, and later that was switched out by scientists with a captive bred young eaglet from another state for the pair to raise.

00:09:20 Liz Anderson

The pair successfully accepted this transplanted chick, and they're successful in raising captive bred chicks for three years.

00:09:29 Liz Anderson

Both hacking and fostering continued at a larger scale after it was found to be successful and baby eaglets were brought in to New York State from Alaska where DDT was not as prevalent.

00:09:41 Liz Anderson

A grand total of 198 bald eagle chicks were fledged in this program and in 1989 their goal of 10 nesting pairs in New York State was reached, so the program officially concluded.

00:09:55 Liz Anderson

Erica Bartholomeus, director of Nature Up North, has first-hand experience of a program that implemented hacking and fostering to restore ball legal populations.

00:10:04 Erika Barthelmess

So I grew up in Cleveland. OH, and my family frequented the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and my first recollection of seeing a bald eagle was there. They had a captive breeding program. Of course I'm old, so I was a kid in the early 70s and bald eagles had declined from DDT.

00:10:24 Erika Barthelmess

And so all over Ohio, I think they were down to four breeding pairs by then and in the wild. And so the Cleveland Museum of Natural History was working with the Cleveland Zoo to try to restore bald eagles. And they had maybe four birds in a big outdoor aviary that you could visit when you went to the Natural History Museum. They would had all been injured and couldn't be returned to the why.

00:10:50 Erika Barthelmess

And they were working on trying to get those birds. I think 1 was a female and they were trying to get those birds to produce fertile eggs. And then the idea was they would take the fertile eggs and put them into nests because there were bald eagles who just couldn't, right, they couldn't reproduce because the eggs would get crushed because they were thin when the when the bird sat on them.

00:11:16 Erika Barthelmess

So they had this guy who basically became the mate of the female eagle and they managed to do what I think was the first artificial insemination of a bald eagle, and then she produced fertile chicks and they did a combination of putting eggs into wild nests and also hatching the eggs and putting really young eaglets into wild nests, and it was really successful. But what I remember seeing was just these birds in these cages there's a big nice outdoor aviary, but it's nothing compared to the wild.

00:11:55 Erika Barthelmess

And now looking back, it's cool to think that those birds who had been injured by humans actually were able to contribute to reestablishing the species all over Ohio. So it was very successful, like here in New York. I think there's now something like 1000 breeding pairs of birds or something like that. Yeah.

00:12:14 Liz Anderson

The bald legal population has continued to increase on its own, with habitat protections, protection from the Endangered Species Act, which was passed in 1973, and the continued ban on DDT.

00:12:26 Liz Anderson

The Endangered Species Act was monumental in conservation and prohibited the harming of any plant and animal species listed as endangered or threatened. The term harm encompassed hunting, killing, disturbing and habitat modification. This meant that bald eagles were safe to regrow their numbers and they had the habitat to do so.

00:12:48 Erika Barthelmess

Right now, the President is trying to change the Endangered Species Act and the Endangered Species Act is what allowed for the recovery of species like bald eagles. And so everybody should write to their representatives and say don't change the Endangered Species Act because it would seriously weaken the act and make it much harder for us to recover species like bald eagles.

00:13:16 Liz Anderson

In 2017, the DEC and New York State confirmed there was 323 pairs of nesting bald eagles. This is 41 years after there was just one pair left in the state in 1976.

00:13:31 Liz Anderson

The conservation status of bald eagles has improved as time goes by. They were delisted from the federal endangered species status in 2007, and they were downgraded from endangered to threatened in New York State in 1999, though they're still listed as threatened currently.

00:13:47 Liz Anderson

Management and conservation actions nowadays for bald eagles includes monitoring established nest sites to ensure quality, measuring reproductive rates and checks for disease. Eagles are tracked and monitored so that essential habitat can be protected to understand annual movement patterns, nest selection and much more.

00:14:07 Liz Anderson

There's a midwinter bald eagle survey that is conducted annually and coordinated by the US Geological Survey and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

00:14:16 Liz Anderson

While bald eagles are no longer threatened by DDT, there are still many prevalent issues that raise concern today. Current anthropogenic threats to bald eagles are habitat loss and modification from development and timbering specifically disturbance of wintering and breeding sites, vehicle and train, collisions and contamination.

00:14:36 Liz Anderson

In addition to this, is the overarching threat of climate change, which causes more intense storms and weather fluctuations, something that can be deadly, especially for newly hatched chicks. Eagles are opportunistic scavengers, so it's common to find them feeding on dead carrion. Contamination becomes an issue as the carrion may have lead, mercury, or other poisons present.

00:14:58 Liz Anderson

In the past, bald eagles were also hunted. Erica has some insight into that story.

00:15:03 Erika Barthelmess

In Ohio, where I grew up, when Eagles, I don't know if this was true across the country, although I think it was people killed them somewhat indiscriminately because they thought they were taking sheep and other like lambs, I guess and other livestock and were even a risk for kids. And so the guy who was one of the founders of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the 1920s built, he saw an eagle nest in a big open snag, and he built a seven story tall tower near the nest so that he could climb up there and watch what the eagles were doing. And, you know, in the 1920s that was pretty radical. He also climbed all the way up the tree to get into the nest to see what the heck the Eagles were eating and was able to show that in addition to fish bones, there were things like muskrat bones, but no evidence of sheep or especially children. And so that was one of the first cases where people really like, looked at the ecology of the eagles and what they were feeding on and realized that, yeah, these things are not these horrible predators that we think they are.

00:16:09 Liz Anderson

Bald eagles are currently federally protected under a couple acts. The 1st is the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and the second that I'll talk about is the Migratory Bird Treaty act.

00:16:22 Liz Anderson

The bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act was passed in 1940 and has been amended multiple times since then. It prohibits the taking, possessing, selling, purchasing, ordering, offering to, sell, transporting, exporting or importing any eagle alive or dead, part of an eagle, nest, or egg. Furthermore, taking is defined as pursuing shooting, shooting at poisoning, wounding, killing, capturing, trapping, collecting, molesting, or disturbing the eagle.

00:16:55 Liz Anderson

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed in 1918 and it was one of the United States first environmental protection statuses, and it currently protects more than 1000 migratory bird species who travel across international borders during their migrations.

00:17:11 Liz Anderson

In addition to these federal laws, bald eagles are also protected under New York State laws.

00:17:17 Liz Anderson

Current bald eagle conservation also includes the bald eagle conservation plan that was published in 2016 by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

00:17:27 Liz Anderson

The plan has three main objectives for future conservation of bald eagles in New York State. The first is to maintain a statewide average breeding bald eagle population of at least 200 breeding pairs geographically distributed throughout New York State.

00:17:42 Liz Anderson

They include a lot of action steps to achieve this objective, some of which include reviewing projects specifically to assess potential impact on eagles, public education and outreach. The prompt removal of road kill to limit the chance of vehicle collisions with feeding eagles and promoting the use of lead free hunting ammunition.

00:18:04 Liz Anderson

This objective also has a table recommending specific buffer distances, so the distance you should stay away from an eagle when doing a specific action and they have it listed for actions such as logging, motorized recreation, and non-motorized recreation among others.

00:18:23 Liz Anderson

The second objective is to maintain protection of our significant wintering bald eagle population. You may notice that you see bald eagles in the winter, so they want to protect those populations.

00:18:34 Liz Anderson

To do this, they outlined 2 actions, first to identify and protect important wintering areas and 2nd to reduce human disturbance through public education and signage.

00:18:46 Liz Anderson

The third objective is to monitor breeding and wintering bald eagles in New York State at a level necessary to detect significant trends in their populations or track status of species in the state.

00:18:59 Liz Anderson

Actions for this include submitting regular bald eagle nest lists of where all the bald eagle known nests are located, conducting regular breeding surveys, and also having an online eagle nest reporting form that the public can use if they are to find an eagle nest. This is a great example of citizen science.

00:19:22 Liz Anderson

The H5N1 strain of avian influenza is an emerging concern with bald eagles. The USDA database of detections of highly pathogenic avian influenza in wild birds, as of when I'm recording this podcast, has 54 entries of dead bald eagles from avian flu in New York State, with two of those entries being from Saint Lawrence County.

00:19:43 Liz Anderson

According to a Washington Post article written in October 2024, at least 606 bald eagles have been detected and confirmed to have been killed by avian influenza in 45 states of the United States. It's clearly a growing issue for bird populations across the state, country and world.

00:20:03 Liz Anderson

Bald eagles are susceptible to H5N1 because they are scavengers and they eat waterfowl. Waterfowl are the main carriers of the disease. Then it passes up the food chain to the species that consume the dead birds. There's currently no cure for H5N1 once the bird is ill.

00:20:20 Liz Anderson

Songbirds are much less susceptible to H5N1, and scientists and conservationists are not concerned about their populations or ability to carry the disease as of now.

00:20:30 Liz Anderson

The H5N1 strain of avian influenza is an emerging and increasing threat to wild bird populations such as bald eagles, as well as a threat to other taxa as the virus mutates and evolves.

00:20:42 Erika Barthelmess

I am reading that bird flu is moving from birds into mammalian wildlife as well, and I've been seeing some stuff about fox that are dying from bird flu, and it also makes me wonder about people who let their cats be indoor outdoor cats. And I don't think we should be doing that in order to protect the birds, but I'm also wondering what risk it's putting cats at.

00:21:07 Liz Anderson

Yeah, I know. Cats are like the most susceptible to dying from bird flu.

00:21:12 Erika Barthelmess

Yeah, so that seems like maybe there's a win for the birds because we love our cats. And if we keep them indoors so they don't get bird flu, and they won't kill birds either.

00:21:24 Liz Anderson

Despite all these threats stacked against them, bald eagles are resilient and are at present a common sight in the North Country.

00:21:31 Erika Barthelmess

When I moved to Canton it was 1999 and you didn't very often see a bald eagle. I mean, they were around but not very frequent and now they almost feel like a dime a dozen, which is exciting, right? I see bald eagles a lot and sometimes just like flying across the bridge in Canton, like, flying right over the bridge. And you're like, I am in the village of Canton, and there's a bald eagle right there. That seems insane.

00:21:58 Erika Barthelmess

But how cool and exciting that we've recovered them so well.

00:22:02 Liz Anderson

When was the last time you saw a bald eagle? Look for their trademark ironing board flat wings as they soar high in the sky. Adults have a white head and tail, but juveniles have a dark head until they're about 5 years old. While juveniles have the dark head, they have white modeling under their wings that adults don't have.

00:22:21 Liz Anderson

When looking for Eagles, check near habitat near large bodies of open water or open fields with sturdy trees for the eagles to perch and observe from.

00:22:31 Liz Anderson

Here's Dan, the project manager of Nature Up North to describe one of his favorite encounters with bald eagles.

00:22:37 Dan French

Yeah, we had a really cool experience with bald eagles last summer at Indian Creek Nature Center.

00:22:44 Dan French

We had a family of bald eagles that we could see from the marsh overlook, at that trail, at Indian Creek Nature Center. So that we saw that first early in the summer of 2024 last summer, and we would see a mother and two babies flying around. And over the summer the water was at its regular level. So there were some dead logs that they would perch on and then go hunting for fish from.

00:23:12 Dan French

So every time we went back after that first sighting, we'd look for them, but something that also happened last summer into the fall at the Indian Creek Nature Center was the DEC lowered the water level. So it was cool to see later on in the year other birds that came in and used the area and kind of encroached on the eagle’s territory a bit.

00:23:33 Dan French

But we'd see those same 3 eagles, the mother and two babies throughout the rest of the summer and into the fall. And I thought that was cool because we could kind of track their progress and the behavior, especially the younger 2 eagles throughout the year.

00:23:48 Dan French

It's also really exciting because we're going to go back, you know, several times this summer for programming that we do with Nature Up North, and I'm curious to see if the family is still there or if perhaps they've been broken up or it's just the mother still living in the area and the water has risen again to where it's supposed to be.

00:24:06 Dan French

So I'm curious to see if they're still hunting behavior or if they're there at all this year.

00:24:14 Liz Anderson

It's important to be a respectful birder if you come across a bald eagle. Stay a good distance away and always use their zoom when photographing birds. The birds behavior should not change significantly due to their presence. If the bird leaves, don't follow it, just let it move on. Limit your noise and movement when observing birds, especially raptors like eagles.

00:24:34 Liz Anderson

If you find a nest, you should stay even further away. Birds can be territorial and protective of their nest and their offspring, so limit their stress and the danger to yourself by moving on or staying far enough away that they're not bothered by your presence.

00:24:48 Liz Anderson

It's also possible to observe bald eagles through live stream cameras that have been set up in many nests. Lauren, a student at Saint Lawrence University, shares her experience of watching these live streams.

00:24:59 Lauren

OK, so for some context, I live in southern New Hampshire. I live in a moderately rural area. I would not say it's as rural as up here, but there's definitely a lot of trees and whatnot. And when I was in elementary school, we used to always have the eagle cams on and we would watch eggs and we would always wait for them to hatch and we would just have so much fun. It was always on when we were doing, like our, like, individual work.

00:25:29 Lauren

So whenever you got bored or whatever, you would just look up and you would see the Eagles come back. Sometimes they'd have food, sometimes they didn't.

00:25:36 Lauren

And I think that really contributed to the fact that whenever we saw eagles in person, everyone was so excited. I was very fortunate to have early education that focused a lot on the environment. We used to have butterflies and like caterpillars, we grow caterpillars. We composted and whatnot. So whenever we saw the eagles, we would get super excited and it was really awesome and we would always see them crossing over the bridge. Near water, there's lots of open water in my area. So we would always see the nesting eagles.

00:26:14 Lauren

So now as I guess I'm a I'm an adult, but I don't watch the live streams of the eagles as often as I should. But every once in a while I get updates on my phone about them and Jackie Shadow, and they're big babies are now on the eagles that I pay attention to most. And then there's another pair. I think it's Scout and Bella.

00:26:40 Lauren

There are more tragic couple, but they did have some eggs. But they're in West Virginia, I believe.

00:26:47 Liz Anderson

Bald eagles are extraordinary birds that deserve to persist in the wild. The story of DDT and its impact in the environment and on the bald legal population serves as a lesson that human actions and developments can have widespread and unknown consequences in the natural world.

00:27:02 Liz Anderson

It is up to us to prevent notice and correct these issues and threats. The success of banning DDT and the Bald Eagle Restoration program shows that the Earth is resilient as long as she's given the chance.