The spring of 2016 is proving to be a fertile season for bald eagles in Southern West Virginia, where a record eight nests containing eggs or newly hatched chicks have been observed along the New River and its tributaries between Hinton and the Virginia border, and six additional nests are being monitored for the presence of young eagles.
"We're hoping to see a few more bobbleheads peeking out in the next week or so" from the six nests with so-far unconfirmed eagle chick sightings, said Wendy Perrone, executive director of Three Rivers Avian Center at Brooks in Summers County.
"The bald eagle population is definitely expanding," Perrone said. "Now, we've got them moving up the tributaries of the New and some of the wider creeks that feed into them."
Eleven years ago, retired Pipestem State Park Naturalist Jim Phillips began organizing day-long winter eagle surveys along the New, Bluestone and lower Greenbrier rivers and their main tributaries between Sandstone Falls and the Virginia line, using a cadre of experienced birders teamed with less-experienced volunteers and park guests to spot and count bald and golden eagles. Two years later, a spring survey was added each March to count eagles and check for signs of mating and nesting activity.
As the number of eagle sightings steadily climbed over the years, Phillips, Perrone and their colleagues began to suspect that bald eagle breeding and nesting was likely occurring in the area. But it wasn't until 2010 that a nest occupied by a mating pair and eagle chicks was spotted atop a sycamore tree on an island a short distance inside the southern boundary of New River Gorge National River.
That nest continued to be occupied annually until last year, when a storm blew off the top section of the sycamore on which it was built, prompting its former occupants to build a new nest partway up a nearby hillside last December.
"There was a chick in that nest yesterday," Perrone said this week.
During this year's spring eagle watch, held in early March, 61 birders and other volunteers spotted 34 bald eagles and 4 golden eagles in the survey area.
Several of the nesting sites were confirmed after the survey after residents of the area reported them to survey leaders.
"We're glad that we're starting to get trusted enough that people are telling us about the nests they've been watching for the past few years," Perrone said.
After being shot into near extinction by farmers who considered bald eagles to be marauders preying on domestic livestock, then being exposed to widespread use of the pesticide DDT, which accumulated in their bodies after the chemical entered the food chain, causing egg shells to become thinner and more fragile, the nation's bald eagle population dropped to 487 nesting pairs in 1963.
While eagles could occasionally be seen feeding in streams or migrating along ridge lines as they passed through West Virginia in the years that followed, it wasn't until 1981 in a remote stretch of the Potomac's headwaters that a bald eagle pair occupied a nest within the state. Now, there are estimated to be more than 100 nesting pairs in West Virginia, most of them still in the Potomac watershed.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169 or follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.