EAGLES FALLING OUT OF THE SKY DEAD

No idea if it's at all related but there was some joker that put chartreuse leak detector dye in one of the Vancouver Island rivers recently.

Guess the Eagles have landed.

Field & Stream

Bald Eagles Starving, Falling From Sky in British Columbia

--Chad Love

Anglers may bemoan poor salmon runs, but for wildlife that depend on them, it's a matter of life and death. Bald eagles in British Columbia are starving, and in some cases literally falling from the sky, due to poor fall-chum-salmon runs.

From this story in the Globe & Mail:
When David Hancock saw the bald-eagle count on the Chehalis River drop from more than 7,000 to fewer than 400 over a few days in December, he knew a crisis was coming. Earlier this week, news reports that starving eagles were “falling out of the sky” in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island, confirmed his fears. Wildlife rescue centres on the Island have reported birds growing so weak from hunger that they fall out of trees, or fly so clumsily they hit things. One crashed into a roof. Mr. Hancock said a collapse of chum salmon runs has left British Columbia’s bald-eagle population without enough food to make it through the winter, leaving them weak from hunger and forcing thousands of birds to scavenge at garbage dumps.

Mr. Hancock said about 25,000 eagles flock to salmon rivers in the Pacific Northwest in the fall, to feed on the carcasses of spawning salmon. One of the biggest gatherings is on the Chehalis River, about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver, where as many as 9,000 eagles gather in November and December, drawn by what is usually a large run of chum salmon. The big fish, which average about 6 kilograms, are among the last salmon to spawn and their carcasses are usually available on gravel bars well into the winter. But Mr. Hancock said the chum didn’t arrive in any numbers on the Chehalis this year, reflecting a coast-wide collapse of the species, and then heavy rains washed away what carcasses there were. The birds were forced to disperse, to look for food where they could find it. “It was absolutely incredible. Within 10 days, we had gone from 7,200 eagles to 345 … So I knew it was going to be a pretty desperate winter,” said Mr. Hancock, who has been studying eagles for 50 years. “So where did they go? I have a count of 1,387 one day at the Vancouver dump … that was in the week following the Chehalis dispersal,” he said.

When there are 1,387 starving bald eagles at one city dump scrounging for food, something is very, very wrong.

I've no doubt missed some relevant details that go with this story, but from what I've read and heard thus far, it ain't adding up. I followed a bald eagle study on the Skagit River in the late 1970s. Wintering bald eagles in this area are certainly strongly associated with chum salmon runs, generally because the chum have been an abundant and easily accessed food resource. However, it would be incorrect to say that the bald eagles are dependent on chum salmon runs. The eagles are opportunistic scavengers, and hunters if necessary.

One year during the Skagit study, the chum escapement was low, and flooding washed away a majority of the carcasses that would have been available. The eagles responded by increasing the range in which they scavange and hunt. Skagit eagles searched the Nooksack and lower Fraser trubutaries for alternate chum salmon. But if chum were scarce region wide, as the above article suggests, the eagles simply widened their search area further. Tagged eagles from Skagit gravel bars ventured further south where they were found preying on wounded water fowl at the huge Klamath wildlife management area. Eagles are highly mobile and don't seem to be choosy about what they eat, altho they have a decided preference for whatever requires the least energy expenditure.

For these local regional eagles to be dropping out of the sky, dead from starvation suggests that these eagles have become so strongly associated with chum salmon that they don't have the adaptability to search other areas for alternate food sources. One possibility that occurs to me is that there are so many more eagles than there were 20 and 30 years ago, that like a popular predator-prey relationship, the eagles have grown so numerous from many years of good winter food abundance that they have now outstripped the combined total sources of winter feed of various types over a very wide area from southern BC to northern California. I'm skeptical, but it's possible.

Sg

Sounds like an excellent reason to seed the rivers with raped carcasses. Perhaps a little "give back" is in order from those who scavage the eggs.

Chemical turned B.C. river green

They say it's non- toxic, but to Eagles and wildlife it must be freaky to say the least. Check out the videos.