Once they've grown their flight feathers, you open the door to give the birds a chance to practice flying and hunting on their own (though there’s still food in the box). The door to the hacking box is grated so the birds can see out, but it’s locked tight until they're fully fledged to keep them from falling. You feed the birds, but avoid interacting with them. First, you bring in baby birds from healthy populations elsewhere in the world and put them in an artificial nest called a "hacking tower"-essentially a wooden box on a raised platform. Hacking has its nuances, but the basic idea is pretty simple. Tom Cade at Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology had led a program to revive the similarly DDT-ravaged Peregrine Falcon population in the state, using a technique called "hacking." The goal of the process is to raise a young bird by surrogate without getting in the way of their natural progression towards maturity and independent hunting, so the bird can make it in the wild as an adult. The female had accumulated too much DDT in her system to lay viable eggs, so barring the arrival of newcomers from Canada, it seemed New York would soon be without the iconic birds.Ī few years earlier, starting in 1971, Dr. In 1976, there was one nesting pair of bald eagles left in all 54-thousand-plus square miles of New York State, living on Hemlock Lake just south of Rochester. (Bald Eagles’ range extends across North America-at their lowest points, eagles were still found in New York and New Jersey, but mostly as scarce migrants.) The ban on DDT in 1972 and introduction of the Endangered Species Act a year later helped the population start to recover, but the eagles still had a long road before they could set up shop in NYC. That’s a big step for a species that appeared to be heading for extinction just a few decades ago.īy 1963, the national symbol's presence in the lower 48 was seriously depleted-only 487 nesting pairs remained in the lower 48 states, thanks to shooting, habitat destruction, and the use of DDT. The presence of these eagles in such a densely populated human environment means two very encouraging things: the local ecosystem is a lot less polluted than it used to be, and the eagle population is getting large enough that some birds are actually getting crowded out of more remote habitats. We’re pretty excited that Bald Eagles are making New York City home. But the South Shore pair stuck around (the exact location of the nest is undisclosed, for the eagles’ protection).
It’s likely they were subadult Bald Eagles “playing house,” as is customary for young birds (though they may have just moved on to less urban digs to mate). The birds hung around the island for a while, but eventually left the area. That pair, first spotted by a tugboat captain on a little New York Harbor island off the coast, was observed shuttling nest material to the top of an unused dock. The couple’s successful nest appeared several weeks after another eagle couple was observed on Staten Island in early February. “Due to the height and location of the nest, it is not possible to actually see into it from the ground.” “The eagles are engaging in brooding behavior typical of nesting birds incubating their eggs,” says Tod Winston, communications manager and research assistant for NYC Audubon.
Local birders have named the male Bald Eagle Vito, and are eagerly awaiting the offspring ( Bald Eagle incubation period lasts between 34-36 days, and the incubating behavior was first spotted last week). Starting a family in New York City is not for the faint of heart-the rent is high, the school system is overwhelming, and stroller traffic keeps getting worse-but that hasn't deterred a young couple of Bald Eagles. The pair has taken up on the South Shore of Staten Island, and they appear to be incubating eggs-making the very first active New York City Bald Eagle nest reported in 100 years, New York City Audubon announced this morning.
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