If all goes well, Hamilton could soon be home to the first young bald eagles hatched around this side of Lake Ontario in more than 50 years.
And it all comes down to location.
A pair of eagles are nesting high in a white pine on the Royal Botanical Gardens lands on the northern edge of Cootes Paradise. If there are eggs in the nest, they may well hatch mid-April.
At the moment, all things point to the return of the first Lake Ontario-born eagles in Canada in the decades since pesticides and environment changes drove them into near extinction. There were only four active nests, or about 15 birds, by the early 1980s.
Environment Canada says no bald eagles have nested on the north shore of Lake Ontario since the late 1950s.
Elimination of DDT, which damaged the shells of eagle eggs well into the 1970s, and vast improvements to fish habitat in Cootes Paradise have played a hand in bringing the birds back to this area.
“This milestone is testament to restoration efforts of Project Paradise,” Tys Theysmeyer, RBG’s head of natural lands, said in a statement. “As we bring Cootes Paradise back to the condition it was before the 20th century, species that once called this area their home will continue to return.”
The eagles were first spotted in the wilderness area west of Highway 403 in 2009, when the male was too immature to reproduce, said Tys Theijsmeijer, head of natural lands for Burlington’s Royal Botanical Gardens.
“We’ve just been waiting for the immature one to graduate to adulthood,” he said. “In the interim they built a nest.”
“We’re pretty sure that if they were going to lay eggs it was in the past two weeks,” he explained. “So we’re looking at mid to late April to see little heads poking up in the nest.”A hundred years ago, bald eagles were a common sight along Lake Ontario. But toxic pesticides slowly killed off most of the population.
“The water became polluted with DDT used in agriculture that washed off the land into the lake,” Theijsmeijer said. “The poison got into the fish, the birds ate the fish and it caused the shells of the birds to be thin and shatter.
“So we just ran out of bald eagles.”
DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 and in Canada in 1989, although its use had been restricted for more than a decade before that.
The eagles have very specific requirements. They need at least 100 hectares of forest to rest and roost and it has to be adjacent to about 50 hectares of wetlands to allow them to catch fish.
The birds have forest and they have fishing in Cootes Paradise due to the steady improvement of the wetland since the creation of the fishway in 1997, which bars invasive carp and has fostered natural regeneration.
RBG has been trying to attract a nesting pair for some time. There are 31 active nests on the great lakes and another 39 north of the 49th parallel but, until now they hope, not a single nest on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario.
The gardens staff say several bald eagles have stayed in Cootes over the winter the past few years and finally a pair stayed over a summer.
Gardens staff built a platform high in a 33-metre white pine in March 2009 with the help of a Hamilton tree maintenance company, hoping a pair would make it their home.
Instead, a pair picked a pine two trees over and built a nest. The pair have built nests on the north and south sides of Cootes since. They have now reached maturity, returned to the north shore site and settled in, hopefully to raise a family.
With files from TorStar News Services
jburman@thespec.com
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How to view the eagles
The RBG has been careful to provide directions to enable those interested to get to the area of the nest without disturbing the birds.
And, they say, it would be a good idea to bring binoculars.
The closest view is from the Marshwalk Observation Platform:
The nest is located on the north shore of Cootes Paradise, about 400 metres directly west of the Marshwalk platform, with the nest set in a lone pine on a ridge in the middle of the Hopkins Wood special protection area.
To get to the platform, start at the RBG Arboretum at 10 Old Guelph Rd. and head west, walking down the Captain Cootes, Bull’s Point and Marshwalk trails to the observation platform. Its about a 1.5-kilometre walk from the arboretum parking area.
The view from Princess Point, at 335 Longwood Rd. in Hamilton, is from a spot near the fishway at the Desjardins Canal and the nest is clearly visible, but it is at a distance of two kilometres.
