Picture Charlie Browne, executive director of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, walking along the edge of the Connecticut River on a winter day at first light. Perhaps the snow crunches under his feet. Perhaps his eyeglasses glint with an orange glow from the rising sun.
Imagine him training his binoculars on a large pine tree along the river where, he knows from experience, a bald eagle is likely to be roosting until the sun comes up. As of this writing, it’s too soon to tell if Browne saw any bald eagles in the northern reaches of the Connecticut River on Saturday, January 12. But chances are excellent that he did.
Browne has been surveying the upper Connecticut River for 15 years as a volunteer for the national Midwinter Bald Eagle Survey, and he’s seen at least one bald eagle each year, and usually more.
“It’s a great excuse to get out,” says Browne. “Crisp, cold weather is a great time to see bald eagles, but so is foggy and dank weather.”
The Midwinter Bald Eagle Survey is a nationwide count of bald eagles in their winter habitat. The idea is to have surveyors all over the country out looking for bald eagles on one of two target dates. This year the dates were January 11 and 12.
There is a national summer survey of breeding bald eagles, but the midwinter survey also provides important information about the numbers of immature birds, the locations of key winter habitats, and the number of bald eagles in particular places (or entire states, such as Vermont) where bald eagles don’t breed, or haven’t yet successfully bred.
Vermont started counting bald eagles for the midwinter survey the year it began, 1979, but the first eagles weren’t seen until 1981, says Mark LaBarr, a conservation biologist with Audubon Vermont who organizes the count in the state.
This year’s survey will be the 28th for the State of New Hampshire, says New Hampshire Audubon senior biologist Chris Martin, who organizes that state’s count.
Both states rely primarily on volunteers to drive a designated route near places where wintering bald eagles are typically found. The volunteers get out of their cars frequently to search for the eagles, particularly at points where there is good visibility of a nearby body of water.
The general trend for bald eagles throughout the country has been positive enough that the bird was removed from the endangered species list last summer. The midwinter counts in Vermont and New Hampshire have shown a particularly strong upward trend, even while counts in other parts of the country, particularly the Southwest, have remained steady or declined.
In 1981, Martin says, eight bald eagles were counted in New Hampshire. In 1991, there were 19. In 2001, there were 42. In 2006, there were 55.
“This is good news,” says Martin.
In Vermont, the trends have also been generally upward. The highest count was in 2005, with 20 bald eagles seen, 15 of them on Lake Champlain, says LaBarr.
The numbers in 2007 showed a little dip in both Vermont and New Hampshire. This is almost certainly because of last winter’s unusually mild beginning. In warm winter weather, bald eagles are dispersed, often far beyond the reach of the volunteer’s binoculars, searching open water for fish and waterfowl. When the weather is colder, and lakes and rivers are mostly frozen, small stretches of open water attract and concentrate the eagles, making for an easier count.
In New Hampshire, Martin reports, these open-water hotspots for bald eagles in midwinter are along the state’s three major rivers (Androscoggin, Merrimack, Connecticut), in the Lakes Region (including Lakes Winnipesaukee and Winnisquam), and in the tidal areas of the Great Bay.
Vermont’s hotspots are, according to LaBarr, the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain. On Lake Champlain, the area between the Charlotte Ferry and the Champlain Bridge seems to hold particular appeal for bald eagles.
This is the route LaBarr himself surveys for the count. He’s seen as many as 14 eagles on that stretch of the lake, or as few as five in a year that was windy, yet warm enough to be nearly t-shirt weather.
On the Connecticut River, eagles tend to concentrate in the areas just downstream of dams, where there tends to be open water through the winter.
LaBarr says that people are sometimes surprised when he tells them that winter is the best time to see a bald eagle in Vermont or New Hampshire. Observing bald eagles in midwinter is good for the watcher, because the possibility of seeing several bald eagles in one spot is higher than at any other time of year, but it’s also good for the eagles, since they are less annoyed by disturbance than they would be during the spring breeding season.