BEACH-NESTING EAGLES

 

Christmas Bird Count crew pose with a new eagle nest on the north end of Smith island on 30 December 2018. Photo by Frank Renshaw

Sometimes no matter how long you have worked with a species and no matter how wild you let your imagination run, you just cannot anticipate what they will do next. The Center for Conservation Biology has mapped and inspected more than 5,000 eagle nests over the past few decades but we never expected to see them taking up residence on the open beach. A newly constructed eagle nest was discovered by the Cape Charles Christmas Bird Count crew on the north end of Smith Island on 30 December 2018. The nest was isolated out on the open beach. This nest would later have two eggs and on 30 March the adult was observed brooding small young. Amazingly, on 1 March 2019 Alex Wilke would find a second beach nest with a young eaglet on Ship Shoal Island.

The beach nests discovered in early 2019 represent the 4th and 5th ground nests constructed on the Virginia Barrier Islands in recent years. On 26 April 2013, while flying shorebird surveys along the barrier islands, Bryan Watts and Barry Truitt discovered an eagle nest built on the ground on the north end of Little Cobb Island. On 5 June 2013, while conducting surveys for beach-nesting birds, Ruth Boettcher discovered an eagle nest built on the ground on Cedar Island. On 1 June 2018 Bryan Watts and Bart Paxton, while flying colonial waterbird surveys, located an eagle nest built on a log on the back side of Wreck Island. These previous ground nests were in the dunes or on the back side of the islands. What makes the two new nests different is that they were located between the primary dune and the active surf zone, a position subject to overwash during high tides or storms and a place normally reserved for nesting plovers, terns, and oystercatchers.

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