Golden Eagle Wing Tag Update 2014

RVRI has been applying vinyl wing-tag (blue with white numbers) on Golden Eagles since 2004. To date, we have wing tagged over 350 Golden Eagles during the fall migration and nearly 70 wintering eagles in the Bitterroot Valley. Wing-tagging provides us with important re-encounter information on individual eagles that we cannot get from standard (USGS) bands alone. For comparison, less than 10% of eagles with USGS bands alone are encountered a second time; whereas our wing-tags are yielding nearly a 23% overall encounter rate. If we break the overall encounter rate down, we re-sight roughly 19% of eagles tagged on migration and roughly 50% of those tagged on wintering grounds! Finally, most of our encounters (approx. 88%) are alive and well, compared to only 5% for standard banding.

These sightings help us learn where individuals’ winter and summer, how far they travel, and how long they live. We feel fortunate to get these glimpses into the lives of these individuals, and hope to better understand the migratory ecology for the species as a whole. This project relies on Citizen Scientists who encounter auxiliary marked eagles and report these sighting to us. We sincerely thank all of the individuals who make this project possible by documenting their wing tagged eagle encounters.

Most importantly, mapping out wing-tag encounters helps define migration routes and seasonal ranges. Many of our eagles are re-sighted along the Rocky Mountain Front (RMF) where the convergence of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains creates a migration corridor from northern Canada to central Mexico. Migration count data, as well as our satellite telemetry studies have shown the critical importance of the northern RMF, stretching from northern Canada to west-central Montana. Our wing-tag encounters along the southern RMF suggest this region is also very important for migrating and wintering Golden Eagles.

While all the encounters are exciting and give us a unique look into the lives of the individual eagles. Here we highlight several that are too good not to share, including our record holder GE 30 encountered alive and well 11-years after tagging!

As time passes and data continues to come in, we look forward to learning more of the outcomes of these individual eagles in our effort to learn more about Golden eagles and a whole.

Check out the migration patterns and sighting of Golden Eagle 30 and Golden Eagle 31

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