Tag: Indiana

Every year, before the banks of Monroe Lake succumb to spring flooding, naturalist Jill Vance leads 20 or so hikers to an unassuming patch of forest on the reservoir’s northern fork.

As they walk, Vance shares one of the Indiana’s most successful conservation stories.

First, she explains how the state became inhospitable to bald eagles for most of the 20th century as industry, hunters and pesticides altered the landscape. Then she tells them how eagles have spent the last 40 years regaining a foothold on the Hoosier landscape, largely due to a massive reintroduction project that took place in these very woods.

When the group arrives at it’s destination — the ruins of a hack tower, a structure that housed cohorts of baby eagles during the 1980s — it’s hard to see much past the tree trunks and vegetation growing up around the site.

Then, Vance points out a glimmer of metal through the brush and “all of a sudden, it kind of pops out of the trees for them,” she said.

Forty years later, the tower is be easy to overlook. The wooden floor has rotted through, and only a few flimsy stairs remain attached to telephone poles, which once propped up the tower.

“What’s left may not be impressive in its own right, but the story is,” said Vance. “There is something special about being able to stand on that spot and see where it happened.”

And for some of the folks along for Vance’s hikes, it’s also nostalgic.

Almost one hundred Hoosiers helped reintroduce eagles during the 1980s. And almost every year, Vance said she walks the trail back to the hack tower with at least one former volunteer returning to see where the project began.

A painful disappearing act

Bald eagles were once ubiquitous across most of North America. Their range shrank northward as many were shot and shoved out of their native habitats — areas near lakes, rivers and coasts — by humans and industry.

Before the reintroduction project, the last successful bald eagle nest in Indiana was seen in 1897. And not even legislation, in the shape of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, could reverse their decline. Bald eagles continued to disappear nationwide.

A new threat soon emerged in the form of pesticides. Farmers began to spray crops with DDT, one of the first modern insecticides. It was used in homes, gardens and office buildings to control pests. Applicators infiltrated cities across the nation, coating the chemical on street trees, parks and front lawns. As DDT dripped into roadside drains and leached into waterways, it hitchhiked through fish and small waterfowl before ending up in the bellies of many of the nation’s bald eagles.

“They are at the top of the food chain,” said Allisyn-Marie Gillet, Indiana’s state ornithologist. “They end up eating the things that their prey were exposed to.”

The farther chemicals travel up the food chain, she added, the more magnified they become. A small fish might build DDT up in its tissue by eating contaminated plankton its whole life. When the creature eventually gets munched on by a bigger fish, the concentration of DDT in the new predator’s bloodstream only heightens. And when that fish, in turn, succumbs to the claws of a bald eagle, its DDT dense meat becomes a poisonous lunch for an oblivious bird.

When female eagles went to nest with DDT coursing through their bloodstream, they struggled to rear healthy young. They could no longer create thick, sturdy eggshells — a requirement for eagles, which sit on and incubate their eggs for over a month.

“They were producing fewer eggs, and the eggshells were cracking whenever they would sit on them,” Gillet said. “The chicks would die, ultimately.”

Spurred by wildlife decline and the 1962 release of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the Environmental Protection Agency eventually banned DDT.

But the damage was already done. The Fish and Wildlife Service documented only 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles across the country in 1963, down from an estimated 100,000 pairs two centuries prior.

Reintroduction begins in Indiana

Bald eagle reintroduction began in earnest about a decade later, bolstered by the newly created Endangered Species Act.

New York, Tennessee and Missouri started programs to reintroduce eagles. And in the early 1980s, Indiana finally found the cash to begin its own project in the form of the Nongame Wildlife Fund, which was money earmarked for the conservation of wildlife not typically hunted or fished.

“We needed a flashy project that would get the public’s attention” and build momentum for the fund, said John Castrale, a retired Indiana Department of Natural Resources biologist. “It would have been a hard sell if we first introduced woodrats.”

So, the DNR went with bald eagles.

Technically, Indiana first reintroduced bald eagles in 1985. But the attempt was “kind of a flop,” according to Allen Parker, a DNR field technician who worked on the project and has since written “A Hope for Wings: Musings of a Raptor Hacker and Tales of Bird of Prey Recovery.”

Three rescued eaglets from Wisconsin and Minnesota were sent to Indiana without much warning. They may have been too old to properly adjust to the Hoosier landscape, theorized Parker. And they didn’t stay long.

“The birds took off within weeks of arrival and were never seen again,” he said.

To help future eaglets feel more at home in Indiana, the DNR built them a designated home base: the hack tower Vance now tours with curious Hoosiers near Monroe Lake. It became the epicenter of the state’s bald eagle reintroduction project for four years.

Volunteer linemen helped Parker place telephone poles and rig the floor joists, but from there, Parker pieced most of it together himself. He fastened a pulley system to his truck to hoist cage walls, tools and bald eagle rearing paraphernalia onto the structure.

“Every single piece had to be hauled up that way,” Parker said. He spent 12-hour days designing the layout, nailing in the flooring, and assembling the 10-foot-tall cages. “But I got the whole thing built.”

Under the leadership of DNR nongame biologist Chris Iverson, Indiana started rearing bald eagles at the tower in 1986.

The eaglets came from Alaska, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. A team from Indiana, plus local contractors, climbed the northern forests to fetch seven- or eight-week-old eaglets by hand.

Parker remembers fighting through twigs and branches to reach eagle nests, which can be six feet wide and weigh over a ton. Once he popped his head over the edge, his immediate concern was grabbing the chicks — often cowering in a far corner — before one of them jumped over the far edge. After scooping them into a bag, Parker would simply “zip them up, hook them up to a rope, and lower them down” to the forest floor.

From 1986 to 1989, the yearly excursions brought about 70 eaglets to Indiana. But the chick-snatching wasn’t all terror and crib robbery, Parker stressed. He said Alaska’s eagle populations were so abundant the younger birds struggled to all find food. In Indiana, there was plenty.

Long days and smelly nights

Parker described the eaglets who arrived at Monroe Lake as “half fuzzy, dumpy looking dudes.”

It takes four of five years for their signature white feathers to completely grow in. At only a few weeks old, young eaglets were covered in ruffled, brown feathery fluff.

Two to three eaglets typically shared a cage, and Parker found himself half-living on the hack tower with them.

He fed them roadkill, fresh fish and donations from friends and neighbors. He monitored their health and cleaned out their cages. And all the while he watched their personalities develop.

One year, two large females started bullying a much smaller male. Whenever the boy went in for a meal, the girls would jump and attack.

“I ended up going in at night, grabbing him, putting him in another cage with two other females,” said Parker. “And lo and behold the next day, he started beating the crap out of the two of them. And he was eating just fine.”

The eagles built muscle as the weeks went on, preparing for their first flights. When the wing flapping became incessant, the DNR team knew the eagles were just about ready.

Each bird was fitted with two bright orange wing tags before release to note their origin in Indiana. They wore federal and state aluminum leg bands, one on each leg. And Parker’s team glued tiny radio transmitters to their central tail feathers to track and monitor the birds as they dispersed.

Then, they opened the cages.

The eagles’ first flights were often clumsy, almost embarrassing affairs, according to Parker.

“Sometimes they would glide out and forget that they had to flap. They’d just land right in the lake,” he said. “Or they would try to land on a perch and not put on the breaks. And they’d end up basically hanging upside down. Figuring all this flight stuff out took them a while.”

Some eagles needed rescue and a little extra time, but eventually, each cohort left their cages for a final time and soared away from the northern fork.

The early years

John Castrale took over the bald eagle project in 1989, just in time to oversee the last cohort of eaglet releases. The next phase of reintroduction was a waiting game.

“We knew this wasn’t going to be immediately successful,” he said.

Eagles spread out far and wide during the first years of their life. They don’t typically nest or return home for four or five years. Castrale got reports of eagles boasting orange wing bands in “virtually every eastern state,” and as far south as Texas.

“As these birds aged, the reports of them were closer and closer,” said Castrale. “In fact, virtually most of them ended up in Indiana.”

Despite being ready to wait, the DNR saw the first inkling of success in 1989.

“All of the sudden, a pair of eagles built a nest within eye shot of the hack tower,” said Parker, who was still working on the reintroduction. “First one in Indiana in over 90 years and they put it right there.”

The pair didn’t immediately produce any eggs, which isn’t uncommon, according to Parker. Instead, he worried what would happen when he released the last batch of eaglets into what was becoming an established territory for the newly arrived nesting pair.

“I was concerned,” he said. “But the really cool thing was they kind of adopted them because they had failed their nest. So here these now adult eagles were bringing food to the hack tower where the eagles were in the cages.”

Using radio receivers, Castrale, Parker and the DNR team tracked the eagles to see when they left the immediate area.

Parker said he wasn’t sad to watch the eagles disperse. Rather, he saw them leaving Monroe Lake and venturing off as a sign the eagles would soon be back for good.

Bald eagles everywhere

The first Indiana-born bald eagles in nearly a century hatched in 1991, leading to hundreds of young fledged over the following 20 years. Nesting pairs have recently been reported in the hundreds, up from zero in 1988. The program was such a success the state removed bald eagles from the list of species of special concern in 2020.

“They have become so abundant,” said Gillett, who continues to oversee the bald eagle population. “We estimate there are more than 350 pairs that are breeding or nesting throughout the state every year.”

Even more eagles fly down to Indiana each winter. They feast on the shores of the Wabash River, reservoirs and waterways across the state.

Some threats still exist on the Hoosier landscape. Eagles sometime ingest fragments of lead ammunition left behind in animals like white tailed deer. And recent outbreaks of the avian flu have killed off millions of waterfowl and shorebirds.

Still, eagles are persisting — and they’re in relatively good health, according to the DNR. The project was also an effective banner for the Nongame Wildlife Fund, which has since raised more than $13 million. The nongame program successfully reintroduced peregrine falcons and river otters, and they are now working on wood rat and hellbender conservation projects.

In the meantime, eagles continue to spread out across the state. The reintroduction team assumed most of the population would settle in the southern third of Indiana, where large reservoirs and river systems create ample habitat. But some sightings have found eagles nesting near cornfields, highways or by small lakes and streams.

“They nest in virtually every county in the state,” Castrale said. “They are a lot more adaptable than we give them credit for.”

IndyStar’s environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

Sophie Hartley is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach her at sophie.hartley@indystar.com.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana’s eagle reintroduction project a conservation success story