Above: Max being released into the wild on Saturday, February 8. Her GPS tracking device is visible on her back. Photo courtesy of Michael and Peg DiBenedetto.
Note from reporter Julia Reischel: I reported last week that a golden eagle named "Max" was captured and tagged with a solar-powered GPS device in the Catskills town of Andes on Saturday.
The eagle, now formally named "Maxine" because she has been positively identified as a female, was trapped as part of a program being run by the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society in partnership with Todd Katzner, a golden eagle expert at West Virginia University.
Max was fitted with a patented solar-powered GPS tracking device attached to her back by a teflon ribbon. After several hours, she was released into the wild. Since Saturday, Audubon Society volunteer Tom Salo tells us, eagle watchers have spotted Maxine in the area "behaving normally."
The article I wrote generated lots of questions from our readers about golden eagles and the ethics of tracking and tagging them. I've spent a few days researching and talking to scientists to find some answers, which you can read below. To read the original story, click here.
Was this really the first time that a golden eagle was trapped and tagged with a tracking device in New York state?
No, I was wrong about this. According to Scott Van Arsdale, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife technician who trapped Max on Saturday, four golden eagles have been captured and tagged with tracking devices in New York state before this one.
'"DEC has banded nine golden eagles," Van Arsdale said. "Seven were wild caught. Four were fitted with PTTs -- all Argos units. The majority, if not all, were probably incidental to our bald eagle work. We used to trap bald eagles every winter."
But Max is the first golden eagle in New York to be tagged with this particular kind of tracking device, a GPS-GSM transmitter manufactured by Cellular Tracking Technologies that relies on the sun for power and the national cell phone network to regularly upload a stream of GPS data.
Todd Katzner, the scientist at West Virginia University who runs the nationwide golden eagle research program that Max will be contributing data to, also owns the company that manufactures these tracking devices.
Katzner said that 80 golden eagles across the United States have been fitted with this kind of tracking device.
"We have done about 50 in eastern North America and 30 in northern California," he said. "This is the first bird captured in New York that has gotten one of our transmitters."
The other four golden eagles that have been captured and tagged in New York were fitted with a tracking system using older technology called Argos PTT.
One of those golden eagles, named A00 after his leg band number, was trapped by Van Arsdale on March 11, 2003 on the Char-Marie Farm in Bloomville.
