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Eagle Tracking
Thank you to our Bald Eagle project partners!
Additional support provided by: Newfield Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The John Steele Zink Foundation, and individual donors.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Welcome to the Sutton Center's Bald Eagle tracking page. Here you can follow, along with us, the travels of two Bald Eagles hatched in Sand Springs, Oklahoma in 2010. We are using the latest GPS satellite tracking technology to follow the movements of these young birds for what we hope will be several years. Where will they go? When will they return? We hope to answer these questions and more. Over 20 years ago we tracked a young Oklahoma Bald Eagle to Canada during the summer, always having to stay in range of the relatively short distance transmitters that were available then. Now satellites can do most of the work. For much more information about this project, click on the Eagle Tracking Information link to the left.
HOW TO USE THE MAPS
To use this page, click on one of the two eagle buttons below. This will display a Google map showing tracking locations for that eagle. You can click and drag the map with your mouse to move it around, and you can zoom in or out using the + and - controls on the left side of the map (HINT: for now, you will need to zoom in quite a bit to see the movements, until the eagles start traveling farther). Clicking on a red location balloon will provide the distance traveled since the previous location. Clicking on the Satellite button on the map brings up a photographic view instead of the map view. Try it!
We will occasionally add some comments about each eagle's movements below the map. We will update the tracking locations regularly to show representative movements of the eagles, especially once the eagles begin making more dramatic daily journeys.
Please note that because of the way we receive the tracking data from the satellites, mapped locations will always be at least 1 week behind real time.
Select an eagle to track:
Female eagleMale eagle
Female eagle
29 June 2010: Early Post-fledging Movements by Young Eagles
For those viewers who have been watching the mapped movements of the young eagles, it might seem that little has been happening. Actually more is going on than might at first appear. The "transmitterized" male first flew from the nest on June 5 and the female on June 9. These were just short flights, but within a few days the two young eagles (and probably their brother that is not wearing a transmitter) had flown across the Arkansas River and were perching in the trees and other vegetation that provide riparian habitat on either side of the waterway. Just as for humans, these trees provide shade during the hot spell we have been experiencing over the last couple of weeks, and some evaporative cooling is also provided from the green vegetation.
Part of the area they have been frequenting on the river is intermingled with sandbars. These structures provide shallow areas where the birds can bathe and sit next to the water. Bathing provides a cooling effect as the eagles sit and dry their feathers, and sitting next to the water also provides evaporative cooling. Sometimes eagles will sit with their feet in the shallows so that heat is transferred directly to the cooling water and away from the eagles' bodies.
The shallow depths close to the sand bars also provide habitat for various creatures that can be tasty to the eagles such as turtles, snakes, and frogs as well as fish. (Fish and turtles were found as prey remains from food brought to the nest by the parents before these youngsters took their first flights.) The first step in catching these animals is for young eagles to just get used to watching them as the prey moves about in the water; this is something the eagles do as they sit on the sand bars or in the trees above. Usually the eagles will soon learn to take these types of prey by snatching them from the water with their feet while in flight, but young eagles first exhibit early predatory behavior by grabbing floating leaves and sticks from the river or even footing at branch tops swaying in the wind. Soon they will begin making capture attempts not only after floating debris but after live animals. While their attempts will be playful initially and not "in earnest," eventually the young eagles will sometimes succeed in catching live prey. During all the playful prey capture attempts the eaglets are learning, and the adults keep the young eagles well fed so they will have plenty of energy to stay on the wing and to keep trying to capture "floating sticks" as well as real prey. Provision of food is the primary role of the adults during this post fledging period; the young are genetically programmed to initiate predatory behavior and do not need parents to teach them to hunt.
These young eagles are building up muscle tone for strength in flight and will become efficient at catching prey so that they can become self sufficient and head north to cooler climes for the rest of the summer. At least we think that is what will happen, judging from what the young eagles did that we hacked out in Oklahoma 20-some years ago after hatching them from Florida eggs (the grandparents or great grandparents of these "transmitterized" youngsters). We are assuming our radioed eagles will be following in their footsteps. Like other site viewers, we are anxious to see what happens, so we will be watching to see when the mapped arrows (tracking movements of the eaglets) strike out and head north. Read more about our Bald Eagle reintroduction project here.