Martin Torresquintero Photo
Ms. Eagle scopes out market.
They’d already begun to build a house by ferrying sizeable sticks of wood effortlessly through the air held in their strong talons.
Now it was time to think of making a family.
So they landed side by side on a sturdy branch of the tallest tree around. They looked alike, as many couples do, although she is a few pounds heavier.
To the right beckoned the reflecting pond of West River, running with bunker and other food for the many meals they would share for the next 25 or so years.
To the left, Ella Grasso Boulevard was running with multi-colored noisy cars, to which the amorous duo paid scant attention.
When the moment was right, they rubbed beaks together. Then the female tilted up her tail feathers a bit, and one of the newest couples in the West River/Westville neighborhood proceeded to try to produce offspring.
All that was on view on a crisp, clear, early Wednesday morning for the lucky dozen people gazing up from down below on the wet marsh grass of West River Memorial Park.
They were there with “Ranger Dan” Barvir of the city’s parks and recreation department, on one of the bald eagle watch tours that have become very popular since the eagle pair decided to make the banks of the river’s reflecting pool and surrounding environs their territory.
Interest has been high, especially on the weekends, with over 1,200 viewers so far, Barvir reported.
Ranger Dan demonstrates an eagle’s seven-foot wingspan.
As we watched, Barvir, a 30-year veteran of the department, pointed out the rich avian life along the river. Families of osprey also fished away, dropping down to catch their prey with a straight dive. An eagle approached the water on a more horizontal, gliding trajectory.
Nearby ring-billed gulls were swooping along the top of the tall riverine grasses toward the free cafeteria that is the West River at morning high tide.
The free tours, which were triggered by the eagle couple’s arrival in the area in February, are one of the city’s newest must-go-destinations. Two more are on the schedule for Wednesday, April 13, and Saturday, April 16. You gather at the Barnard Nature Center at the southwestern corner of Ella Grasso Boulevard and Route 34. (For more info, call 203 – 946-6086 or 203 – 946-6559.)
It’s likely more tours will be added, Barvir said, especially if the eagles produce eaglets and complete the nest they have begun. That ought to be clearer in about a month, the gestation period of the species.
Linda Reger has a look through Ranger Dan’s scope.
“They’re going through the motions” of courtship, copulation, and building a home, Barvir said. At 5 years old, they’re mature, he said — the full white head of feathers below the bald crown is the sign — and ready to mate (monogamously) as it turns out, and have eaglets.
Most of the binocular-bearing attendees on the tour were retirees like Bob and Linda Reger, who had lived most of their adult lives on Stevenson Road in Westville, recently downsizing to a smaller home in Hamden. They came this bright, clear morning in part because they already knew from eagles. A number of years ago, one alighted on a pole outside their house on Stevenson Road.
It stayed only for about an hour, reported Linda Reger. She and her husband had a longstanding curiosity about the city’s natural settings. Now in retirement, they are far freer to act on those impulses.
As the group moved slowly along the river bank towards the tree where an eagle — we weren’t sure if it was the male or the female — perched, Barvir at various points stopped and set up his Bushnell SpaceMaster birding scope to give the tour members a chance to look close up.
When Linda Reger took her turn, she pronounced what she saw “amazing.”
An eagle’s skull (in plastic model) shows a small brain, but large optical capacity.
While the eagles were certainly the centerpiece of the tour, nearby the ospreys — who have at least three platforms set up in the area for their nesting — were busy fishing and courting, while a dashing black vulture also joined the air show because one of the ospreys had a glistening fish in its talons.
Barvir explained how the two species don’t particularly like each other but more or less leave each other alone.
“There’s no love lost between cousins,” he said.
Kim Amatrudo, recently retired from working 19 years at Yale-New Haven Hospital’s radiology department, asked Barvir where the eagles’ nest is located.
He promptly picked up his scope. We began to walk around the tree where the eagles perched and now mated oh so quickly, to the far side closer to the Boulevard.
Federal endangered species legislation as well as several Connecticut state statues enjoin you to keep at least 200 feet away from eagles and not to disturb them. After being decimated during the 1940s and 1950s by DDT and other pesticides, the birds, since those chemicals were banned, have made a successful comeback in our area. (They are flourishing in the midwestern and western states.)
Retired machine shop owner Dave Holbrook, of Westville, was full of praise for nature’s return to the area.
Barvir praised Connecticut Audubon and other organizations for the return of the eagles. “We have a lot of people monitoring them,” he said.
The male, which is known and banded, is from the Hartford area, Barvir said. He thinks the female is a Mainer. All told he estimated there are 15 to 20 pairs in the state.
There’s another bald eagle pair in Milford. The closest to us, next to the West River couple, is a pair whose territory is on Upper State Street, visible near the Porto Tire plant, on the North Haven border, he added.
Barvir, who spends a lot of time with the birds, doesn’t have names for them. Nor, despite having led over the years a gazillion tours of nature with school kids, does he infantilize or “cute-ify” them.
What he has is an appreciation for them that runs deep. “It’s been about 30 or 40 years to have them back since we cleaned up the DDT. I don’t name them. They’re birds. I don’t anthropomorphize them. They’re wild, beautiful birds of prey.”
As we walked gingerly around the tree where the birds were perched, there was a crash, a fender bender on the Boulevard.
We humans instantly turned our heads toward the sound. But the eagle — there was one on the perch now after the mating episode, the other having flown off — just sat there unperturbed.
“He’s probably thinking about what fish might be in the water,” Barvir surmised.
Or the eagle might be scanning the skies to guard the territory; while the eagles don’t mind the other birds around, like the osprey and gulls who fish with them, no other eagles would be allowed within miles of their territory without a skirmish.
Barvir was leading us on the grass toward approximately where Legion Avenue arrives perpendicular to the Boulevard. Before we got there, as a loud siren of an ambulance or fire vehicle approached, the remaining eagle flew off. Someone said the siren scared him. Barvir said that might be so, but it’s only human speculation. “Maybe he thought it was just time to fly off,” he said.
Eagles have no natural predators except humans, he added.
As we beheld the large tree across the Boulevard, in the grassy expanse along Legion, Barvir pointed out an array of at least six nests of an immense size, all built by monk parakeets that also abound in the area.
The eagles had appropriated the one toward the top of the tree, Barvir said. That was where, thanks to early infrastructure supplied by the busy parakeets, the eagles were flying with large branches ripped from the trees by their talons, to add size and heft to the nest.
This was one of the “motions” Barvir had meant when he said the pair of eagles appeared to be ready to have offspring.
Even if they don’t have chicks, which would hatch in about 35 days and more or less be on their own as hunters within two or three months, the birds will likely stay in the area, he added.
Eagles and monk parakeets are competing for the Legion Avenue arboreal condos.
Barvir encouraged the tour members to return and to bring others. Viewing birds with scopes and binoculars or with the naked eye satisfies something deep and longing within humans, he speculated, as the group members returned to their cars in the parking lot beside the fine statue of the World War One Doughboy.
“We were hunters and gatherers,” Barvir said as he folded up his scope.
“Then we went indoors for 5,000 years. This truly fulfills a need. It’s the most meaningful way to ‘hunt.’ It’s benign.”
Coming soon is a small but meaningful addition to the area: A box by the West River where fishermen can deposit their monofilament line, in which birds get tangled if it’s left exposed by the shore.
There have been no issues of any kind with the eagles thus far, but lots of ospreys die because of that, Barvir added.
Ranger Martin Torresquintero Photo
Eagle, the female, carrying an eel.
Professional photographers or others interested in specialized tours can contact Martin Torresquintero here.
