A May-December courtship may be developing at North Park, where a grieving widower has been keeping company with a hot young chick.
A female bald eagle that had been nesting for two years on a hillside overlooking North Park Lake is missing and may have been struck by a vehicle along the nearby Pennsylvania Turnpike. The nest is dormant.
The bird’s mate, however, has found companionship with a juvenile bald eagle, believed to be a female. The male, with the white head and tail of a mature eagle, has been photographed flying and perching at the park with the juvenile, which still has the dark head and tail of a sub-adult bird.
Eagle watchers at the park are waiting to see what happens next.
“Lots of people are upset that there’s no nesting activity this year, after two years of nesting but no fledglings,” said Andrew Wagner, a member of the North Park Bald Eagles Facebook group, which posts amateur wildlife photos and shares information. “All I know is the female was around, and then she wasn’t. Sad but true.”
After decades of avoiding Pittsburgh’s pollution, bald eagles began returning to Allegheny County in 2010, when a nest was built near Crescent. Since then four additional nesting sites have been discovered, in Hays, Harmar, Glassport and North Park.
North Park is the most recent nesting site, constructed by a mature female and her younger mate. The distinctive white head develops when an eagle is sexually mature at the age of 5.
The male was still showing specks of black when the pair began fly-over explorations of the county-run park, which is in McCandless, Hampton and Pine. The nest was built in 2018, but the inexperienced couple chose a spot almost directly above a well-used portion of the 47.5-mile Rachel Carson Trail.
No live-streaming wildlife camera monitors the site, and no eaglets were fledged in the nest’s first year, which is not uncommon among eagles. The 2019-20 nesting season also passed with no signs of reproduction. The female was last reported seen Sept. 17.
In October, Zeb Campbell, a game warden with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, responded to a call about a bald eagle that had been hit by a tractor-trailer on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, about 2 miles east of North Park.
“The eagle was incredibly damaged but still alive. Both of its wings were mangled. It was a mess,” said Patrick Snickles, a game warden supervisor and information officer for Game Commission. By charter, the commission is solely responsible for wildlife management in the state.
“Officer Campbell determined it was too far gone to be rehabilitated and dispatched it,” said Mr. Snickles.
Following Game Commission policy, the eagle’s remains were sent to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which records data from deceased bald eagles and donates the carcasses to Native American tribes. Bald eagles were removed from the federal lists of threatened and endangered species in 2007, and delisted from those conservation categories in Pennsylvania in 2014. They remain protected by federal and state laws.
“We can’t confirm that the bird that got killed was the North Park bird,” said Mr. Snickles. “We don’t ID eagles individually unless they’ve been banded. As an agency, we don’t necessarily need to know where the bird was from. We treat them all the same.”
Members of the North Park Bald Eagles Facebook group, which had named the nesting pair Ms. Rachel and Mr. Carson for the famous naturalist who was born in Springdale, wanted closure to the lost eagle saga. They asked to see photographs of the corpse, which they hoped would show identifying features. The Game Commission declined the request.
Howard Kepple, manager of the Facebook page, is still upset.
“[Officer Campbell] flat-out refused to show us any of the photos. He didn’t even want to talk about it,” he said. “She had distinctive markings on her beak that might have identified her. The Game Commission, the park service, they didn’t police the nest site even when we told them people were getting too close. They didn’t do anything to help these birds.”
Allegheny County Parks Department officials did not respond to interview requests from the Post-Gazette.
Mr. Snickles said it is not Game Commission policy to share mortality photos following telephone requests, and he said signage had been posted cautioning onlookers to maintain a distance from the nest. The agency, he said, is in the business of species management, not protecting individual wild animals.
“They’re beautiful and we want people to enjoy [wildlife],” he said. “But we don’t personalize them. They’re not pets, they’re wild animals that require some space and sometimes management assistance. In this case, with the nest so near to a well-trafficked area, it’s possible that unintentional human intrusion contributed to it becoming a failed nest site.”
Bald eagles mate for life. After choosing a nest site, the couple generally return each year to renovate and upgrade woven-stick nests that can in time expand to weigh 1,000 pounds or more.
Rachel Handel, spokeswoman for the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania, said it would be unusual for an eagle pair’s bond to be broken, unless one didn’t return to the nest following an injury or death.
“But anything is possible,” she said. “If an eagle doesn’t have the partner it had before, it could go for a replacement.”
Locally and nationally, she said, Audubon is all too aware of the conservation conundrum that occurs when well-intentioned people who want to observe wildlife get too close for the animal’s comfort. Disturbances during the eagle mating and egg-laying seasons, in particular, can thwart reproductive success.
Mr. Snickles said if the North Park female is gone for good and the male finds another mate, they are likely to choose a new nest site. It could be near the old nest or some distance away, but this time, he said, the male might insist on a less busy neighborhood.
John Hayes: jhayes@gmail.com.
First Published: February 24, 2021, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: February 24, 2021, 10:33 a.m.
