Where are Golden Eagles 733 and 834? While we are sweltering through another hot bald eagle summer, the two are staying cool up in Canada and Nunavut!
Golden Eagle 834 is spending time on the Melville Peninsula, a steep rocky landscape with colorful flowers and numerous summering birds, including loons, geese, eider ducks, jaegers, plovers, snow buntings, snowy owls, and of course golden eagles. As 834 drifts through the sky, he might look out to sea and glimpse migrating beluga and bowhead whales, herds of walrus and pods of narwhal: a beautiful but completely different world than his wintering territory in the Driftless! 834 covered 149 miles in total last week and is currently 170 miles south-southwest of Igloolik, NU – or a little over 1600 miles north of his winter capture location. I wish I could see the ground unrolling beneath his wings.
733 is hanging out near Fort Severn, Ontario: another area rich in food and well known for its polar bears! I keep hoping she’ll show up on explore.org’s Churchill Polar Bear cam, although it hasn’t happened yet! She is about 900 miles north of her capture location and appears to be doing well.
If you’d like to explore the travels of any of the eagles we’ve tracked, bald or golden, visit our interactive maps here: https://www.raptorresource.org/learning-tools/eagle-map/. To learn more about our Golden Eagle tracking project, follow this link: https://www.raptorresource.org/learning-tools/golden-eagles/. A thousand thousand thanks to Brett Mandernack and Ryan Schmitz for sharing their maps, data, and experience with us. Fly high, 834 and 733! We hope to see you in the Driftless this winter.
Image Credits and More Links!
The Raptor Resource Project