Wednesday, June 22, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Tales from a
Sisters
Naturalist
by Jim Anderson
A golden eagle
disaster
Working with golden
eagles over these past 50-plus
years has been — and con-
tinues to be — an adventure,
most times glorious, and
other times shocking.
Eagles are and always will
be a high point of my natural-
ist experiences, as they have
been long before I rolled
into Oregon on my Harley in
1951.
Back in the mid-’50s I
discovered the U.S. Fish &
Wildlife Service had a gang
of trappers who were using
a lethal poison known as
1080 to kill predators. It was
also killing everything else
that got into the bait, eagles
included.
That got me started check-
ing predator-control poison
stations and, sure enough, I
found dead eagles, poisoned
by federal trappers while
attempting to eliminate coy-
otes from the face of the
earth.
The dead eagles I found
near those 1080 poison sta-
tions really got me upset. I
wrote a letter to the head of
U.S. Fish & Wildlife voicing
my concern at the U.S. gov-
ernment’s role in killing our
national bird. Somewhere in
my files I have the response:
“Dear Mr. Anderson; Thank
photo by Jim anderson
ross took a full load and his brother thought that was pretty funny.
you for your concern over
eagles; they’re shot as a nui-
sance in Alaska…”
In 1962, I was issued my
federal banding permit with
special permission to band
eagles and other raptors.
Both my oldest sons, Dean
and Ross, became part of that
annual springtime event. As
they grew, so did their partici-
pation in banding raptors, and
by the time they were teenag-
ers we were a team.
The picture below shows
one of the lighter moments
of banding and handling
nestling golden eagles. Dean
is demonstrating his crass
humor because Ross was the
innocent victim of one of the
perils of handing nestling
eagles; he received of a blast
of excrement from a full-
loaded eagle. Falconers judge
the strength of their bird by
how far it can squirt waste, a
process known as “slicing.”
Eagles hold the record.
I must admit I laughed
right along with Dean. It took
a long time, but justice has
been handed down.
Just the other day my wife,
Sue, and I were checking an
eyrie way out in Lake County
and discovered three young
eagles (a rare occasion, two
are the norm), and very close
to fledging from the nest.
“Boy,”Sue said, “We gotta
band those youngsters or
they’ll be gone.”
The next day we returned
to the old lava cliffs where the
eyrie is located, our climber
L a i n g d o n
Schmidtt got on
his ropes and
sent down the
first (and larg-
est) of the three
young eagles
in a special bag
that kept the
eagle safe in its
travels.
I was sitting
on a rock when
Sue handed me
the bag, which
I carefully
opened, reveal-
ing a huge young
golden eagle (a
female for sure)
of approximately
six weeks of age,
fully feathered got ya!
and weighing
in at about nine
pounds, only two weeks from
fledging.
I reached into the bag,
grasping both wings tightly
so the bird could not get a
wing loose and injure itself,
or knock my head off. Her
beautiful head came out of
the bag, staring at Sue, who
was shooting pictures as fast
as her Canon could go. With a
lot of effort I lifted the rest of
the eagle clear, squeezing her
wings tight against her body
and being careful to keep the
flailing feet and talons away
from my legs.
At that moment an event
took place that took me
back into the 54 long and
wonderful years I’ve been
29
photo by Jim anderson
banding eagles. This giant
baby looked at Sue and (I
think) winked, then hunched
up, raised her tail feathers and
let ’er rip!
The force of her “slicing”
was so strong that when the
white, black and other liquid
elements hit me I almost fell
over. The odor wasn’t much,
but the content and force
was overwhelming. It tore
into and all through my shirt,
went into my undergarments
and then like a hot waterfall,
descended into my britches,
clear to my socks.
Such are the perils of
banding eagles … and wait
till Dean and Ross get their
copies of The Nugget!
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