A recent study showed that bald eagles in northwestern Washington have adapted to climate change and have stopped eating their usual meals of salmon carcasses. They found something better – helping farmers! These eagles help dairy farmers by stopping pests from coming onto the farms and getting rid of dead animal bodies. So, these birds are really useful in providing natural pest control.
Recently, scientists published a report in the journal Ecosphere that explains how bald eagles and dairy farmers in northwestern Washington state can help each other out.
Scientist Ethan Duvall from Cornell University says that usually people don’t like birds of prey because they think the birds will hurt their animals. But in northwestern Washington, farmers are actually happy with the birds because the birds help out by eating dead animals and keeping away pesky pests.
Emily Schwabe and Karen Steensma from the University of Washington and Trinity Western University, worked together with Duvall to talk with farmers who worked on small, medium, and large farms in Whatcom County. They wanted to learn more about the special relationship between eagles and farmers. The research was based on Duvall’s previous studies which showed that eagles had been moving away from rivers towards farmland because they can’t find enough salmon carcasses in the past 50 years.
Duvall, who works with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said that because of climate change, chum salmon now spawn earlier in the winter. The problem is that this coincides with an increase in water levels in the Nooksack River. This causes many of these salmon to be swept away by the strong current and taken away from where the eagles can get them.
Duvall said that the change in when salmon swim upriver has caused there to be fewer dead salmon along rivers. This lack of winter food from the salmon has hurt eagles in the Pacific Northwest who depend on them for food, causing a big drop in their population.
Bald eagles have to find alternative food because their natural sources of food are decreasing. To do this, they eat things like dairy farm by-products that come from cows being born and dying, and they hunt waterfowl who live in agricultural areas. These eagles also help farmers by eating rodents and starlings which would be pests on farms.
Duvall said that most of the time, farmers and Bald Eagles don’t get along very well – especially when the eagles try to catch chickens in free-range poultry farms. But this study gives us hope that farmers, wild animal managers, and conservationists can find ways to help people and animals live peacefully together in the same spaces they share.
Researchers have found that Bald Eagles and Dairy Farms can actually work together. A study published in Ecosphere recently showed how the relationship between bald eagles and dairy farms can be beneficial to both. This research has been able to demonstrate a way of matching these two that may prove useful in other areas of science.
Reference: “A win–win between farmers and an apex predator: investigating the relationship between bald eagles and dairy farms” by Ethan S. Duvall, Emily K. Schwabe and Karen M. M. Steensma, 8 March 2023, Ecosphere.
DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.4456
