Bald Eagles

[00:00:00] Alex Re: Hello, welcome to On Wildlife. I'm your host, Alex Re. On this podcast, we bring the wild to you. We take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every week, and I guarantee you you're going to come out of here knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before. This week, in honor of the 4th of July, we're taking a look at an animal that has become one of the symbols of the United States.

[00:00:26] These birds are efficient predators using their excellent vision and their talons to catch their prey. And there's a lot about them that's misunderstood. And I have a special guest, David Hancock, founder of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, to help give us all the important details about them. So let's get up in the air and to talk about bald eagles.

[00:01:05] Bald eagles can be found all across North America, and usually near bodies of water. This is where their prey lives. They're one of the most recognizable birds, with adults that have brown body feathers and white feathers on their head and tail. Their wingspan can get to be up to seven and a half feet long, which is almost a foot longer than the average height of an NBA basketball player.

[00:01:31] There's so much more to tell about these awesome birds of prey. So let's hear from David, who has spent most of his life studying wildlife. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started your career studying bald eagles?

[00:01:45] David Hancock: Yes, that's a good opening six hours. So let me get a glass of wine.

[00:01:53] Well, my name is David Hancock and I've been involved in wildlife for one heck of a long time. I caught a hawk when I was 12 and the guy who told me how to modify my little quail trap was quite surprised when I phoned him, my father finally tracked him down late that night that after advising me how to modify a quail trap that catch a hawk.

[00:02:15] I had caught one and my dad eventually nearly at midnight managed to track down who this guy was because I couldn't remember his name and I then by the evening being over and into the next morning, I was a budding falconer and I had learned how to jess up a hawk and that kind of changed my whole life.

[00:02:40] Because I, I then got into trapping lots of hawks and very quickly I was into banding and I had my own banding license when I was 15 and, and I'd been so enamored by the ability of these raptors and I was by this time training, not just the Cooper's hawk, like the one I first caught, but gosh, socks and peregrines, which I was catching.

[00:03:02] And so. I was so enamored by how they flew that I decided I had to fly. And so I learned to fly when I was 15, took all my exams and put in all the time, but I had to wait. That was the first big disappointment of my life. I had to wait until I was 16 to get my pilot's license. So I got my driver's license and my panel's license the same day.

[00:03:25] And anyway, that, that's what got me involved. And because this gentleman and I had met, happened to work at the local provincial museum and was a kind of a key focal point for all the biologists, whether they were the ornithologist and the ologist. Uh, the, I theologist the, the botanist anthropologist. And then the people from the wildlife branch and the parks branch and the forest all met in his office every day to review what should have been done by the government about all their recommendations, but had never been paid any attention to, which was the form that all these poor biologists were suffering.

[00:04:05] And that briefly summarizes why I did not initially become or become a biologist. A wildlife biologist who at that time had to either be a university professor or a government employee. And I didn't want to be a professor and to be a government employee meant you did your wonderful studies. But nobody paid any attention to the results.

[00:04:31] And so that was very, very frustrating for every one of those biologists. And they all said, David, you love wildlife too much. Don't become a biologist. So that's what I, so my first profession, when I got out of high school, I became a commercial pilot and, and by the time I'd been flying for a few years, three years, it turns out, I realized to have the freedom of the Hawks and the Falcons, And flying, I wouldn't get this by working for an airlines.

[00:05:02] So I decided to go to university, become a biologist and become a flying biologist. And because I've been brought up with David Attenborough's first filming adventures. In 1953, four or five, the day I graduated from high school, I bought an airplane, a car and the best movie camera you could buy. And I was going to become a flying biologist taking pictures like David Attenborough.

[00:05:27] So that's how my career has gone. And after the three years of the flying, I decided that I'd go to university and become a biologist. So I spent my seven years and I was fortunate. To do the graduate studies on my favorite bird. I had had my thesis actually accepted when I was an undergrad because the professor at the graduate school over on the mainland, I was living in Victoria, British Columbia.

[00:05:53] He had funded some of my early studies before I even went to university. And when I proposed this kind of extensive. Eagle thesis, which involved flying to several hundred nests. Nobody's ever done that. Anyway, so there, that's my, that's my background.

[00:06:14] Alex Re: Now let's dive a little deeper into David's career studying eagles, including creating one of the first ever live streams.

[00:06:22] David Hancock: I got out of school and I formed a research component to make the wildlife films and carry on on my own on studying eagles. And, uh, to make a living. For the first 10 years, I became a walleye filmmaker and producer. I decided that the only way in those days in the sixties to get your money back because it, it wasn't like today where you got 50 television stations.

[00:06:49] There, there was the CB, C and cad, Canadian Broadcasting System, and, and another two networks and three in the United States. And that was it. And they had between them one wildlife program, and trying to make a living selling them film was near impossible. So after 10 years of being a flying biologist and making films, I decided that, because that was very arduous, to make the money back, you had to go out and lecture with the films all winter long, and in the summer you'd go make a film.

[00:07:21] Well, I decided that I'd have enough running around like that, so I decided to start a publishing company. I had written two or three books. And I knew a lot of people who wanted to write books. So I decided I'd take a year and write a few books myself and figure out how they worked and get several other people doing it.

[00:07:41] And I have spent. since 1970 to today, owning a publishing company. We've done 700 books on, on wildlife and historical people. So I've been very blessed and fortunate to be able to have chosen topics all over the world. I mean, when it got into the publishing, I was able to choose doing books on rare and endangered birds simply because nobody else wanted to publish such a bizarre book.

[00:08:07] They couldn't figure out how to make a living from it. But I knew all the breeders all over the world. Cause I had a big bird collection. So I, I had access to a market that big publishers did not have access to, and I was able to make that work. At that point, which was 2005, I had done A hundred books on rare and endangered birds, and I had contacts with every kind of major bird group, conservation group, every research library, every zoo, because that's what I used to make the films for, all around the world.

[00:08:44] So the day we decided to launch the world's first live streaming cameras. I had in my mind, well, how am I going to promote this? Is it, well, first of all, because nobody knew how to get live streaming cameras to work then, and nobody had actually been able to even figure out how to break a live stream and put an ad in.

[00:09:06] So I wrote a press release about, this awesome example of this bird walking up to the camera. And then the next scene, the next scene is really a mind blower. We had just witnessed an eagle in labor. Who has ever seen an eagle in labor, let alone heard it? So I was just absolutely smitten by the biological perspective of, of being able to look into eagles lives from live streaming cameras.

[00:09:39] And so I wrote this up in a little kind of a press release. of how awesome this was. And I thought, well, I have to send it out to somebody. So I sent it out to my list of customers. who were biologists and falconers and birds of prey about. And I had a list of 43, 000 emails in the world. So it was a good start.

[00:10:02] Finally, they get the camera going and they get to look at it. And it turns out, I'm looking at eggs that are not pip. And pip means have a hole in the top. I realized this egg isn't gonna, the eggs that we're watching, and there's now hundreds of people, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, it turns out, trying to watch this.

[00:10:23] From all over the world. But anyway, the, the egg isn't hatching, so I have to go out and find another pair of eagles, I figure. So I spent three days and I finally find another pair. So we went live the next day and the next day was only a day and a half to two days later than the first egg should have hatched.

[00:10:46] So it was kind of fun and, and I worked at that for two years. And then I finally, I, I, I don't mean I turned my back on, but I had to stop my. Total 24 hour a day involvement with the cameras that I had the publishing company was languishing at the moment. And so then I got back to doing some eagle research and books and more cams and it's just been a kind of a wild ride.

[00:11:16] Ever, ever since then. And maybe something else that was kind of lucky for me. We had a not for profit foundation and nobody could excuse me. I'm trying to make money from it. I never charged anybody for we just gave out information about how to disseminate the stream and how to do it. And we helped hundreds of people make their stream, whether it was on eagles or penguins or Cranes or storks or whatever.

[00:11:43] So it was kind of neat because we were kind of honored to, to be a kind of a spokesman for something that was a little bit bigger by far than us.

[00:11:53] Alex Re: Absolutely. And that kind of just goes to show you how far we've come with technology and how much we take for granted now that anybody can go look at a live stream on the internet right now, but it was a huge deal back then trying to make that happen.

[00:12:09] 2006. It's only

[00:12:11] David Hancock: 18. Yes. It's 18 years ago. Yeah. It's 18 years ago. So it isn't all that long, but it's come huge, huge strides.

[00:12:20] Alex Re: Absolutely. Totally. And I, I'd love to start talking about eagles. So there's a lot of different eagle species out there, not just bald eagles, but what differentiates bald eagles specifically from the rest of them?

[00:12:33] David Hancock: Okay. That's a really interesting thing. Bald eagles. are one of the world's groups of different eagles. Bald eagles are a fish eagle, and there's 10 fish eagles around the world. Most of them are in the southern hemisphere. The fish eagles evolved from the old world vultures. These are the big vultures that are plotting around the velds of Africa or the velds of India and so on.

[00:13:02] They are not active predators. They're totally vultures by and scavengers by their lifestyle. They're not all closely related. So there's a whole diverse group of animals. We throw into the category of eagles, but they're all quite, and the most different are really the fish eating eagles, of which our bald eagle is one of them, and the big, the biggest of them is the stellar sea eagle of east, uh, eastern Asia.

[00:13:31] It's a magnificent bird, and I've spent a few weeks out on the ice floes of the Sea of Okhotsk there, working on, on that eagle. It's a magnificent beast, but it's just an oversized, overgrown balls eagle. And of all the world eagles, I think probably without a doubt, the bald eagle is one of the most successful.

[00:13:52] It's most closely related eagle, which is the Eurasian whitetails eagle. So all the eagles have their own specialty, like most creatures in the world. They've evolved over a few hundred thousand million years to find a niche where they've developed some specialty. to make a living. And our bald eagle is kind of unique.

[00:14:18] It specialized in how to catch fish, which let it leave the veld where there was a hundred thousand zebras and things, and go out elsewhere. And the buff is kind of fascinating. While it allowed it to go and spread over every mile of shoreline for where you could get fish to take to its nest, it retained totally Totally, the ability for half the year of his ancestors, and it's a scavenger for half the year.

[00:14:49] So our bald eagle, they come back from their migration about October, defend their nests, rebuild them, but don't lay eggs until February or early March. And they've all got their eggs and chicks now. Some of them are already five and six weeks old this year, and there's a few that we think haven't even laid eggs yet.

[00:15:10] So the eagles get to be hunters and fishermen for five, six months of the year. And scavengers, their old ancestral habit, they revert to that and they really don't catch much at all. They may chase a few things for exercise and practicing and honing down their hunting skills, but they really Our scavengers for six months of the year.

[00:15:36] And then comes the spring. Our birds are already laying eggs here in the spring. The Northern birds are still here because their Northern lakes are all frozen solid still. So they're around and they're competing with our birds. But, and there's a big, but here it's also with the whole coast opening up.

[00:15:54] For a new, a new spring and a new summer. So there's a little bit about the psychology of, or the habit of how A great north south latitude of eagles adapts to the changing seasons, and how a bird that was a scavenger became a fish feeder and reverts to half a year of his old habits of being a scavenger, and it's a very successful It's pretty cool.

[00:16:24] Combination. Because this eagle is very successful.

[00:16:28] Alex Re: Okay, we've got plenty more to learn about David and bald eagles, but first, let's take a quick break.

[00:16:44] Time for our trivia question. What is the smallest primate in the world? The answer is, Birth's mouse lemur. They're only about three and a half inches long.

[00:17:12] Now let's get back to the interview. And I'm really interested to learn more about some other adaptations that these eagles have that make them so successful because you talked about their perfect timing when it comes to food. So. Do you have any other adaptations that you can think of that eagles have?

[00:17:32] David Hancock: Yeah, survival. When I was learning to fly, I was 15 and I was flying all around. I had to log the time to get to qualify for my pilot's license. Because I already had an eagle when I was 14 and was into birds of prey, it seemed much more fun to go out and circle with an air Now I had to rent an airplane, see?

[00:17:57] And go out and look for eagle nests. I already knew where some were around home, but now I could go out and cover the whole, what was called the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. And I circled all around our area and I came up with just over a hundred eagle nests. The American U. S. Canada border goes through these islands.

[00:18:15] I, the sign I've been looking at, the eagles were all Canadian eagles. So I'll just Cross a hundred meters and half a mile. And these are all these American islands. So I thought, well, I might as well survey them as well. So I would go circling around the American islands all the way from the board, Northern border, all the way to Seattle.

[00:18:36] And I could not find a single, single, single pair of nesting eagles. It's the same habitat is divided by a line going North and South, no eagles on the American side. So this was bizarre. Because Alaska offered 2 bounty for every pair of eagle legs that you could put in a bucket and take back to Alaska, the Canadian population did not offer an actual bounty on eagles, but we were part of a same development scheme that permeated the world.

[00:19:12] It was that predators everywhere. Didn't matter whether you were an eagle, a falcon, an owl, an a wolf, a bear, a seal, or orca, even if you were one of the predators, you were considered the enemy of humanity. And so everywhere it was, the predators were the escape goat of our ability to overharvest everything.

[00:19:40] And we had always overharvested whatever the food source was and then blame it on a predator. It was just, it was the easy way out. So that prevailed still in Canada. And there were people that would constantly shoot eagles, even though there was no bounty. There are more eagles nesting In and around Vancouver today than there were probably 300 years ago, because we have, it's a small area, but it's the mouth of the most productive river system of Canada, the Fraser River, but we have changed the whole mouth area, the whole estuary, we've cut it up with farms and hedgerows and big ditches full of fish and frogs, nesting ducks and geese and so on.

[00:20:26] We've actually increased in this small, small area, the food for eagles and the eagles have said, Hey, you've now quit shooting us. We can come back in and occupy this area. And they've done so with. And it's so marvelous.

[00:20:44] Alex Re: I can't believe there used to be a bounty on eagles. It's no wonder their populations were struggling for so long. Thankfully, it's illegal to kill them now, but there's still a lot more work that we need to do on our end to help with eagle conservation.

[00:20:59] David Hancock: If you let the eagle live in your backyard, which is What's happened in Vancouver, and it's a very small physical city. We've got 26 pairs of active eagles in the first area, just south of there, the city of Delta, I've got 84 pairs nesting in the city of Delta.

[00:21:18] I've got 56 pairs nesting in the city that I live in Surrey. It's not quite as out to the mouth of the river. So it's not quite as. Good eagle habitat, but I still got 56 bears nesting here. I mean, that's awesome as a conservation and the public wants their eagles, but they of course have done a lot of things that are negative over the history of evolving how humans live in our Valley.

[00:21:47] It's the most popular place of Canada to live. So what do we do? We cut down all the big trees along the shoreline because we don't want to disrupt our view. Or we cut them off. along the rivers and it's the river edges and the coastal strip where eagles would normally nest. So what we've been doing is building back the last few years nest sites for eagles.

[00:22:13] We either take a tree that they couldn't build a nest in and we built one in there for them, or if there's no trees at all, We put up poles and they live in our, our artificial nest totally. And, and this has been so successful. The big thing about its success, I mean, this is what encourages me for the first 55 years of my involvement of conservation.

[00:22:36] I just had to sit back and watch every developer cut down every nest, even though for the last many years they were protected, the developer knew he could get away with getting the premier or the minister of that department to sign off. Yep. Go ahead. It's illegal, but you can do it. And down would come the eagle nest.

[00:22:56] That does not happen anymore for the last 10 years in our valley. They have to call somebody, a biologist like myself, my associate here, and, and we will give a plan. It's called a mitigation plan. And we have been 100 percent successful in moving the eagles or holding them there because we've recommended certain time restrictions, or we've moved them for a few months to another nest.

[00:23:23] We've kept the tree protected. Not knocked down because there's no real reason to knock the tree down. It's just that it was convenient. That's what developers do. They clean the whole area and then it's easier. But leaving a big tree is just a conscious thing. If you leave the Eagle nest there, they'll probably come back to it when that, when the building is finished and you've taken away all your heavy equipment and that's what we've found is so, so we've been evolving a very practical way, paralleling.

[00:23:54] How the eagles are adapting to us, we're adapting to giving them back some of the things that they have lost. So, we have learned just as the eagle has learned, and the eagle has adapted to, to this. new environment in and around people and provided they're given nesting structures high enough up for privacy and so on, they have done incredibly well.

[00:24:24] Alex Re: That's great. That's great to hear. And some people might be wondering what importance do they have to the ecosystem?

[00:24:32] David Hancock: This is rather interesting. Eagles are predators. Predators are generally pushing the species to find the one that's weakest. That's just fundamentally understood. And there are a few exceptions, but generally speaking, if they're testing a flock of birds to see how effective they are, it's the weak one that's going to get nabbed, say.

[00:24:56] So they're taking out the least desirable one and they're removing it from being a rotting disease transmission component. They're eating it. So that's, that kind of role the predators. Fulfill across the spectrum.

[00:25:16] Alex Re: That is really interesting. And also I'm interested to know, you talked a little bit about how you first got interested in birds in general because of their flight.

[00:25:26] So there's something that bald eagles do this mating ritual called the death spiral. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why they do this?

[00:25:36] David Hancock: Yeah, sure. The bottom line is they don't do that. They, it's not a mating. The point is they will get into a spiral, but that's not the mating part of it.

[00:25:47] That's nothing to do with mating. It, it's about fighting territorial defense to keep the our arrival away. The eagles have a wondrous aerial display, but the aerial display of mating where the male and the female are, are following each other. It's an incredible ritual where It's usually the male following the female and they come and do things in unison, but it's not aggressive.

[00:26:19] And within usually a second or two seconds of looking at this behavior, you know, whether this is a pair undertaking a bonding exercise, he's checking her out and she's, and, and they're. They're doing things in unison together. Now, if this is a conflict situation where it's a male on a mate against the male, because the one is intruded into his home, that can end up with them locking talons and spiraling to the ground.

[00:26:49] That's nothing to do with mating. It's the, about protecting the area from a diamondroder. I mean, it's in a sense the opposite. And it was written in an early scientific journal in 1800. The mating display of eagles was to go up and lock calen, and they somehow mated as they're falling to earth. Now I have watched Thousands upon thousands of matings of eagles.

[00:27:18] If you watch our cameras, you will probably, at most days, see two or three matings. Eagles love to mate. And obviously, it's all related to developing the bond between the male and the female. And when you get to know these great birds for a while, you realize, Mrs. Eagle rules the roost. She is 25 to 30 percent, generally, bigger than he is.

[00:27:49] He is totally subservient to her. If you go out in the middle of winter, even sub adult or adult eagles, there's a bunch of carcasses, or one, maybe, carcass, of, let's say, a bean's cod, and, uh, The female comes out and takes possession. It may be initially, there's 50 or 500 eagles around watching this cod get thrown out, or salmon.

[00:28:12] Then you throw the salmon out, and it turns out the females are a little more apprehensive usually. The males are the first to respond, so they come in quickly and try to get a dinner. If you have a creek lined with fishermen all fishing in the Salmon River and some of them are putting their catch on the side of the river 10 feet from them, it'll always be the males that come down and try and steal that fish because they have more courage about being close to people because they know it's safer there than being close to females, big females, because initially they're going to be demanding the fish.

[00:28:50] And that's exactly what they do. They always demand the fish once they build up their courage about coming into the site. So now the females are on the controlling the fish and there's a ring of maybe five males, six feet, eight feet from her, and she's just. Very hungry. So they just wait, and she eats one, two, three mouthfuls of food.

[00:29:14] And she started to get some big satisfaction. And so every male now takes another one or two steps closer. And so this is a gradual, you build up these relationships. And even the young males are tolerated after the females have their first big feed. And then she's more and more tolerant is and get he gets closer and closer and pretty soon.

[00:29:38] He's eating between her legs and she doesn't care. I mean, it's kind of a kind of wondrous behavior and and I had a great joyous time watching this for some years

[00:29:51] Alex Re: That must be so awesome to see and just to observe their behaviors. So cool. And this will be my last question, but we've learned so many amazing things about eagles.

[00:30:03] How can the average person help bald eagles, or just eagles in general?

[00:30:08] David Hancock: Well, it's like most, most things. It's about saving habitats. And another big one is, of course, from eagles being partly scavengers, they'll come down on the roadside to eat a dead pheasant or a dead duck that was hit, or a raccoon or a rabbit.

[00:30:25] And then, of course, they fly up in front of the car and they get nailed. So we need to develop habitats. For most things where they are secure that the prey aren't running across roads and getting killed, but they have places where they can more securely cross roads and the predators where they can more securely find things that are dead and dying or they're, they're live food.

[00:30:53] So the bottom line is just enjoy them. I mean, that, that is the biggest thing, enjoy and appreciate them. When you can encourage your city, your parks, or a golf course, golf courses, every one of our golf courses has one or two eagle nets. I mean, golf courses are one of the most best places for producing eagles of anywhere, or our local parks.

[00:31:19] But some areas have more golf courses than parks. And so golf courses are really important. And with golf now not being so popular, there's a tendency to convert them all to housing subdivisions. Which is devastating from the Eagle's point of view. So this is a good role for local people to say, No, you, you can't just convert 30 acres of golf course to 30 acres of housing.

[00:31:44] You've got to take out and leave some of the ponds and the trees around the ponds for some degree of wildlife. So that your question is answered by people getting actively involved in their city. And saying, we just want to produce habitat for more diversified species. So people just need to care and want to rebuild.

[00:32:07] I mean, it's often rebuilding habitat. And for eagles, it's pretty simple and straightforward. Get trees to grow along the rivers and, or just inland from rivers and, or put up artificial poles. They will nest in these things readily. So, I mean, it's about adapting and that's giving support to that is one thing that people can do to advance eagle survival.

[00:32:31] Absolutely. So I, I thank you for your interest, Alex. These are stories from 65 years of being a seven years now. I'm 86. So that's 70 years of dealing 72 years since I've got my first eagle.

[00:32:46] Alex Re: Well, I appreciate you coming on to talk about this. I, I really learned so much and I, I'm, I loved hearing all of your stories, so thank you for that.

[00:32:56] David Hancock: Thank you.

[00:32:58] Alex Re: I want to thank David for coming onto the podcast and sharing his experiences and knowledge about bald eagles. I love that he gave us a positive spin on how conservation has changed over his lifetime for the better. And if we keep working to preserve these habitats, it'll be so beneficial for all native wildlife.

[00:33:18] If you want to learn more about how you can help bald eagles, you should check out the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, the American Eagle Foundation, and the American Bald Eagle Foundation. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me as we explored the world of bald eagles. You can find the sources that we used for this podcast And links to organizations that we reference@onwildlife.org.

[00:33:44] You can also email us with any questions at On Wildlife dot podcast@gmail.com, and you could follow us on Instagram at On Wildlife, or on TikTok at On Wildlife. And don't forget to tune in next month for another awesome episode, and that's on Wildlife.

[00:34:08] Jess Avellino: You've been listening to On Wildlife with Alex Re. On Wildlife provides general educational information on various topics as a public service, which should not be construed as professional, financial, real estate, tax, or legal advice. These are our personal opinions only please refer to our full disclaimer policy on our website for full details.