Almost a decade after they were removed from Minnesota's threatened species list, bald eagles continue to make a solid recovery in the state.
The number of nesting pairs of eagles found in a statewide survey is up 28 percent from 2000, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reported Tuesday. Acting on tips from the public and known nest locations, surveyors found 872 nesting eagle pairs in the spring, 191 more than in 2000, when a similar survey was conducted.
But they estimated the number to be an even higher 1,400 by using a new method to calculate nests the survey might have missed, said Rich Baker, project coordinator for the DNR. "For the first time, we have an estimate of all the nests in the state," Baker said.
That would push the state past Florida and Wisconsin, which reported more eagle nests than Minnesota five years ago, and into second place behind Alaska, Baker said.
"It's great news," Baker said. "The word we have been passing out for quite awhile now is that we're doing better, but how much better we didn't know."
As part of a project involving several agencies, authorities devised a method to estimate the number of nests that get overlooked in counts.
They divided northern forests into a grid, randomly selected 5 percent of the individual plats and conducted detailed flights over them. They multiplied that data to come up with the new total.
"What we never knew before was how many nests we didn't know about," Baker said. Biologists also looked into factors that hold down eagle numbers and determined the birds weren't bothered much by proximity to people, he said. What was important, he added, were large trees near shorelines to build nests.
By any account, bald eagles have made a dramatic recovery. Victims of hunters and the deadly pesticide DDT, they were having trouble surviving by the middle of the 20th century, when their numbers in Minnesota dropped to fewer than 100 nesting pairs.
In 1967, the bald eagle was placed on the federal threatened species list. Authorities set a goal of 300 nesting pairs in Minnesota by 2000 but reached it in 1987. Then, in 1996, the bald eagle was removed from Minnesota's threatened species list.Duluth News Tribune
