Raiders of the Lost Eagle
-The icing of the cake-
The final step in our work with the crowned eagles consists on capturing and ringing the nestlings, in order to equip them with the GPS trackers that will gather information about their behavior during the following years. With that aim, we returned to the areas we visited before.
This was a two-night trip in which we visited 4 nests and we ringed two nestlings. The other two were not big enough and we will return to those nests in about some weeks. The first nest was located near Santa Isabel. We left Santa Rosa in the early morning and arrived there at noon, on a really hot day. After our work looking for, and finding the nest of the eagles it was really nice to finally being able of capturing some. This first nest was located about 200 meters from the nest, however the nest was in a tree in an area with a really dense vegetation. It took us more time than expected to reach the nest and the nestling. In spite of this, we were able to capture the nestling, do the measurements and attach the GPS without any problems.
Figure 1: Picture of the area where we camped.
After this, we had a quick lunch and then headed to a ranch located in the surroundings of the outpost of Rulo. However, we weren’t able to reach Rulos outpost before dusk and we decided to camp in a Dune area in a lost place in the middle of the west the Pampa (Fig. 1). We had a really god night there, we did a small “asado” for dinner and enjoyed the view of a really big moon (Fig. 2). The next morning, we arrived to the outpost of Rulo and headed to the other nest. In this place the vegetation was more open, and I was able to take some nice pictures of the adults (Fig. 3). We finished ringing the nestling in the early afternoon, and headed back to Santa Rosa.
Figure 2: The Moon
This was a really nice trip, we were able to see and handle this amazing species that is severely endangered, let’s hope that the research conducted by the CECARA helps to the recovery of this beautiful species.
Figure 4: Above: The adults of the crowned eagle. Below: The nestling
David López-Idiáquez 29-January-2019