A recently fledged eaglet harassed by a blue jay at Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center near Mansfield in May 2023. Becky Cover/ Georgia Department of Natural Resources
While the well-known story that Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be the national bird may be exaggerated, it is true that the founding father praised the wild gobbler’s virtues in a tongue-in-cheek letter to his daughter.
“For in Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America. Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey was peculiar to ours,” Franklin wrote in 1784.
This Independence Day, Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Bob Sargent says Americans should be grateful we wound up with the eagle on our greenbacks, on our politicians’ podiums and on soldiers’ patches.
“With all due respect to Ben Franklin, the wild turkey is a spectacular bird, but I don’t think there’s much that’s more majestic than the sight of a bald eagle soaring over a lake,” said Sargent, who is a program manager with the department. “So I think that it’s very much an appropriate symbol. The fierceness, the wildness, the size, the beauty of the bird, it’s rareness.”
“And America is a country that’s resilient,” he added. “We’ve come a long way since the 1700s when we were fighting for our independence. And the bald eagle likewise has come a long way since the days that it was an endangered species.”
Sargent is one of the few people who regularly see eagles from above – part of his job is to get out in a helicopter and take a census of eagle nests across Georgia.
“It’s just kind of an awe-inspiring experience to see Georgia from the perspective of 400 to 600 feet, because we cover so much of it, and to see a small piece of the private lives of these birds is just, it’s a gift, it’s a wonderful experience,” he said.
This year’s survey focused on the coast and the southern part of the state and found the birds nesting at average on the coast to just below average levels in the southern part of the state. Of 176 active nests, 127 were successful, fledging an estimated 190 eaglets.
Accounting for areas not monitored this year, Sargent said the numbers suggest Georgia has maintained over 200 nest territories a year for the past decade.
Sargent said a decline of successful nesting in southern Georgia over last year may be a result of storm damage from last year’s major hurricanes or a delayed impact from avian influenza, which hit eagles on the coast hard in 2022.
But he said the dip should not detract from the eagle’s huge success over the past five decades.
“The overall trend is very encouraging – 25 years ago, we only recorded 55 nest territories in the whole state and in the decade that was the 1970s there was only one successful nest recorded the entire 10 years,” he said. “So we’ve come a long way. Bald eagles in Georgia are still rare. It’s still listed as a threatened species under state law, but it’s going in the right direction. Since 2015, we know that we’ve had at least 200 nest territories in the state per year, so that’s very encouraging news.”
The state agency cites a 1972 federal ban on the pesticide DDT, which significantly weakens eagles’ eggshells, as a major factor in the birds’ recovery, along with the enactment of the federal Clean Water and Clean Air acts, protection through the Endangered Species Act, increased public awareness, restoration of local populations through release programs and forest regrowth.
The state agency cites a 1972 federal ban on the pesticide DDT, which significantly weakens eagles’ eggshells, as a major factor in the birds’ recovery, along with the enactment of the federal Clean Water and Clean Air acts, protection through the Endangered Species Act, increased public awareness, restoration of local populations through release programs and forest regrowth.
Eagle earmarks
But Sargent said he is cautious about whether the federal budget cuts could inadvertently harm efforts to help eagles recover.
Funding for conservation programs for non-game species like bald eagles comes from something called the State Wildlife Grants Program, which is an annual congressional allocation.
“I sometimes have people say to me, ‘Your funding should be fine because it’s coming from hunting licenses,’ but that’s actually not true,” Sargent said. “We’re concerned about the future of the State Wildlife Grants Program. We’re monitoring that. Right now, it’s unclear what’s going to happen to that grants program.”
Georgia Wildlife Federation President Mike Worley said his group and others are lobbying members of Congress to keep that funding coming to states.
“It’s not a lot of money across the whole nation. It has been around something like $72 million. Georgia’s been getting about $1.6 million over the last few years for doing our work. And it’s really critical for the work that goes on here, whether it’s work on gopher tortoises or the bald eagle population that we’ve seen tremendous success and tremendous recovery with.”
While charismatic critters like eagles may get a lot of attention, plenty of lesser known plants and animals also need help, Worley said.
“It will be working on some darters in some of the streams in Georgia, some mussels that live in North Georgia streams – Georgia is one of the most biologically diverse states in the country, and we’ve got well in excess of 1,000 species that when we look across the state are in some degree of pretty significant concern,” he said. “And so the state wildlife action plan which identifies all of those and puts together a methodology for protecting them is really critical, and those state and tribal wildlife grants are the funding mechanism for that effort to recover the species.”
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This post was originally authored and published by Ross Williams from Georgia Recorder via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
