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Text Box: the bald eagle. It may have had some effect, but the bald eagle was recovering on its own before we even banned DDT. Something else was affecting the bald eagle in the late ’50’s and we have no knowledge of what it was. These agencies always state that we had a certain number of nests, such as 471, in the early ’60’s. They don’t know. No one knows. That was only the number of nests that we knew about, but there were only five or six people looking for the nests. There is no way that we could know where all the nests were located in the nation. Back on Feb. 20, 1965 my crew and I watched over 450 eagles migrate overhead that day between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm. There have been very few days since when that number has ever been sighted. Yet their claim is presently we have over 10,000 nests. Why don’t we see as many as 4000 eagles migrate by in one day? The Army Corps has been keeping track of how many bald eagles their personnel see near certain dams on the Mississippi River for the past 7 years. I have placed the results of these counts for the first two weeks in January on the next page. The one thing that stands out for me is how the percentage of young seen on 1-13-2010 was the lowest for any of these counts for all the years they have been conducting them. But then I have to take these counts with a great big grain of salt. For example on 1-16-2008 they recorded the same number of adults and the same number of immatures at three different dams. I cannot image what the odds would be for that to actually happen. This makes me really question the validity of those figures. Are some other numbers fabricated also? As you can see from Terry Bibo’s article further back in this issue, many people have excuses for the poor numbers of eagles everyone is seeing. Very few of them want to accept the fact that the bald eagle population is having problems. But none of them have any experience in studying bald eagles. They may have seen bald eagles in the wild, but they have not intensely studied them for close to 50 years. I don’t have the answers, but I do know that the Fish & Wildlife Service had better put the Bald Eagle back on the Endangered Species List and soon. Only after that has been done will we be able to loosen up some money for the research that needs to be done. As long as the Bald Eagle is off the List people, businesses and government agencies are keeping their pocketbooks closed. We must stop government agencies such as the IDNR and the Army Corps from destroying bald eagle habitat on their own property. We must get F & W to actively enforce the bald eagle habitat protections which they have placed in the Eagle Act. We must get the fisheries people to find out why there are few gizzard shad in the Mississippi River. We need to be checking the dead eagles that are found, and the fish that they eat, for Round-Up or any of the other pesticides that are being used. The government denies that Round-Up is a problem as it is a herbicide and should only be killing plants. But we know it is killing our honey bees. Perhaps it is working its way through the food chain to affect other animals as well, and perhaps eventually man. We have a lot of work to do! If the Eagle Nature Foundation doesn’t do it, who will? ■

Text Box: Eagle-watching can be a persnickety pursuit. Most months of the year, a glimpse of one fierce white dome is enough. But in January and February, it has become commonplace to spot eagles by the dozen when conditions are ripe. “The most I’ve ever seen was when I lived on the Illinois River, on Christmas Day,” enthuses retired photographer/entrepreneur/sportsman Jack Bradley. There’s a big tree, right by the water. Twenty-six eagles were sitting there in front of my house.” He snaps out the directions to slush-packed riverside roads, telling tales of eagle sightings past. It’s an ideal day. Clear skies make it easy to trace the outline of bare black branches against blue. Snowy fields and iced-in coves have limited other hunting possibilities, so open water along the channel should lure big birds like a magnet. Half an hour later, one eagle is perched in a cottonwood at the north end of Shore-acres Park about a block above and beyond the idling Honda. It ignores us. After backing into a mini-drift, then grinding out, the hunt continues southbound on Illinois Route 29. “I always spot’em along here,” Bradley says confidently, pointing out another shaggy mass tucked in the cleft of a tree at water’s edge. “There’s one!” It turns out to be a squirrel’s nest. Bradley shrugs. In all, the 70-mile cruise up Route 29, across the bridge at Lacon, and back down Illinois Route 26, the eagle at Shoreacres is the only one to be seen. That seems to support Terrence Ingram’s theory. On the cusp of his 50th annual midwinter eagle count, the head of the Eagle Nature Foundation says the bird should not have been taken off the endangered species list. But the very next day, delighted patrons of the East Peoria Steak’n’Shake report they’ve been watching five of the big raptors cluster in one tree outside the restaurant. From Chilli to chili is a whole different story. What gives? A Passion for eagles Terrence Ingram has been scouting eagles for five decades. He was a physics teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Platteville when he first began to research birds of prey. But in 1963, he was part of a midwinter bird count that spotted 155 eagles. “They almost turned it down,” he says of the organizers’ disbelief in his numbers. “They’d never had that many eagles in the 60-plus years they’d done the count.” Obviously, he’s got some history. As Ingram focused his energies on eagles over the decades, his life seemed to fuse with their fluctuating fate. After the early years of dwindling numbers, the birds have rebounded to the point they are considered one of conservation’s biggest success stories. At 70, Ingram doesn’t pull any punches when he disagrees with the prevailing narrative. He was about as welcome as an eaglet in the punch bowl when he stood up to the 12th Biennial Governor’s Conference on the Illinois River last October. Despite all the rosy reports we get from the Fish & wildlife Service and from the IDNR, our bald eagles in Illinois are not doing well and are having trouble,” he concluded, calling the official numbers “a sham” that needs to be corrected. “We must all do what we can, today, before it is too late!” The Illinois Department of Natural Resources had just confirmed the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Board’s