LEILA FADEL, HOST:
On a frigid January morning, a small team of researchers went into the woods of Maine searching for a mysterious bird, a golden eagle. The huge raptors are conspicuous in the wide-open American West, but in the East, they are surprisingly secretive. Murray Carpenter reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOOLS TAPPING)
MURRAY CARPENTER, BYLINE: It's an hour before sunrise and 5 below zero at this small clearing in the woods. Trish Miller and Mike Lanzone are kneeling in the snow, pounding stakes to secure a net.
MIKE LANZONE: With those springs that it's attaching to, that's what causes the bow to spring over the eagle.
CARPENTER: The New Jersey couple came here to trap what they call a ghost of the Eastern Forest, a golden eagle.
TRISH MILLER: Hardly anybody realizes they're here. We don't know how many are here. Maybe 5,000 is our guess right now. But somehow 5,000 eagles pass into the Eastern U.S., and very few are seen by humans.
CARPENTER: Research by Miller and Lanzone and their colleagues in the Eastern Golden Eagle Working Group shows that the eagles breed in eastern Canada and winter as far south as Alabama. This spot seems promising because a trail camera has documented an eagle on a bait pile that a coyote hunter keeps in the woods here. After setting the trap, they settle into a nearby blind for a long, cold wait. Golden eagles used to breed in the Northeastern U.S. but suffered from habitat changes and the lingering effects of DDT. The last known pair was here in Maine.
ERYNN CALL: So they were last present as a breeding pair in 1996, and then they were gone in 1997.
CARPENTER: Erynn Call is a raptor biologist with the state of Maine. She's also on the stakeout but waiting down the road at a country store. Last year, Call started a project to learn more about golden eagles and was surprised to get trail cam photos at 13 sites in Maine. She says they're easily confused with a more common bird.
CALL: Young bald eagles. So bald eagles that are less than 5 years old look very similar to golden eagles. So a lot of people think they're seeing golden eagles when, in fact, it's a bald eagle.
CARPENTER: Lanzone and Miller sat in the blind from dark to dark that first day, serenaded by barred owls, pileated woodpeckers and some curious ravens.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAVEN SQUAWKING)
CARPENTER: But they get only a brief glimpse of an eagle flying by. Then the next day, in late afternoon, Miller quietly texts Erynn Call to say, he just flew to a tree right above the bait. The next text simply reads, got him. Call and several colleagues rush to the clearing to help. They find Miller holding a huge eagle, deep brown with golden highlights on the nape of its neck. After placing a leather hood over its head, the team weighs and measures the bird, bands its leg and takes blood samples. The team straps on a small backpack topped with a tiny solar panel. It's a GPS unit that will log the eagle's movements.
LANZONE: This is the first one that I know of that's been telemetered in Maine.
MILLER: In Maine, yeah.
CALL: Yeah, this is the first time. Very exciting.
MILLER: It is exciting.
CALL: And it's exciting because it might have different behaviors than any other birds that have been trapped elsewhere.
CARPENTER: Then Miller holds the bird as Lanzone removes its hood. The golden eagle looks around in the fading afternoon light, then flies silently to a tall pine and disappears into the shadows. Miller says it's a productive end to two wintry days deep in the Maine woods.
MILLER: It was exhilarating because you never know what's going to happen. You never know if you're going to get skunked or not, and we didn't get skunked (laughter).
CARPENTER: For NPR News, I'm Murray Carpenter.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FLY LIKE AN EAGLE")
STEVE MILLER BAND: (Singing) I want to fly like an eagle. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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