BBC Snippets

Link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/bristol-birds/03-2008/msg00034.html

Restoring a Bald Eagle population to our region became a project of passion throughout Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia as the decade of the 90's took flight.  No other bird conservation endeavor has been so embraced or so rewarded by the citizens of the Mountain Empire.
 
The Bristol Bird Club and its members played a major role in making that happen.  It is one of the club's brightest success stories.  The project and our members attracted national recognition and national awards.
 
It took wings and flew on Aug 16, 1990 when TWRA Region IV Non-game biologist Bill Yambert was conferring on the phone with Wallace Coffey about possible respiratory infection a Red-tailed Hawk might be suffering.  It was in the care of a Bristol vet.

In conclusion of that conversation,  Yambert asked if Coffey knew anyone that could contribute to a needed $9,000 to get the first year of a Bald Eagle hacking project underway.  It would be conducted over several years at nearby South Holston Lake.  They were searching everywhere for private funds. Such monies could attract a federal cost-sharing match and raise the amount to nearly $20,000.  Eventually, the entire cost of the project might reach some $70,000.
 
Coffey response was that he would personally find the $9,000 in donations. He felt it would not be a problem.
 
He went to see the publisher of the Bristol Herald Courier and proposed that the newspaper take this on as a public project and let readers from all over the region share in the restoration of eagles to their area.
 
A proposal package was sent from TWRA and the U.S. Forest Service.  It all looked doable.  Less than two weeks later, Sam Bricado of the Cherokee National Forest and local ranger Sheryl Maddox were in Bristol to sign off on the project.  The goal was then set at $10,000.
 
The hacking project would be carried out on Cherokee National Forest lands near Little Oak Campground at South Holston.  It called for relocating 30 young eagles from nests in breeding areas from the north to South Holston.
 
The  Bristol Herald Courier would publish articles seeking donations and sponsorship of eaglets to be hacked at the site.  It would be a big project.
 
When one eaglet was hatched near Dover, TN in 1983, it was the first known successful Bald Eagle nest in Tennessee in 22 years.  The number of nests has increased steadily since then with more than a 100 nests each year and an estimated 120 young eagles successfully fledged each year from those nests.
 
In the long run 29 birds were hacked over a three year period from the huge hacking towers at South Holston.  Eaglets were brought from Alaska and Wisconsin during the period 1991-1994.
 
In Dec 1990, the Bristol Bird Club had decided to make the Bald Eagle its emblem.  The club's new newsletter was named "The Eagle."  At the March 1991 BBC meeting the club donated $525 which was raised by gifts made that night by members.  The club adopted one of 30 young eagles to be hacked.  A few weeks later,  Carolyn and Wallace Coffey adopted another bird in their own name and called it "Big Creek" for the area near where the eagles were being hacked.
 
BBC named its bird "Osceola" for the birding area below South Holston Dam.  The weir was new in 1991 and the island had been the site of a Boy Scout camp by that name.  It seemed very appropriate.
 
The delivery of six birds captured from nests in Wisconsin arrived by airplane at Tri-City Airport on Wednesday, June 10, 1992.  "Osceola" was on board.  Wow!  What a rush.
 
Everything seemed to be a blur.  Money was raining in like a waterfall as the funding drive began.  It was kicked off at Little Oak with wildlife and forestry officials and local civic leaders and birders attending a press conference.  A live Bald Eagle had been sent to the site by Dolly Parton's Bald Eagle project at Dollywood.  The media was feeding in a frenzy.
 
It was quickly decided that everyone who wanted to donate pennies or a dollar would be allowed to participate in the contributions.  That opened a flood gate of money.  Even people passing thru the region read about the project in the newspaper and sent donations when they returned home. Memorable was Mr. & Mrs. Roy Trent of Yorba Linda, CA near Santa Ana who sent a check on behalf of their granddaughters.
 
A high school student by the name of Kevin Hamed, club president of the Sullivan East High School Key Club, came to see Coffey April 5, 1991 and delivered a $500 check from the club to sponsor an eagle named "Patriot."  Coffey had never met Hamed.  Kevin would eventually become naturalist at Steele Creek Park Nature Center.  With his new wife, they became BBC members and attended one of the club's first Christmas parties.
 
Tennessee Tech, where Hamed got his undergraduate degree, managed the hacking project and used graduate students to take care of the birds and release them.   The university set up a fund and every penny raised was passed along to the fund.  Every check donated was made payable to that account.
 
On April 8, following the kickoff, Coffey wrote Yambert at TWRA and told him $9,168 had been pledged and $6,665 had been received and sent to the fund.  With the drive just two weeks underway,  he wrote that an effort to now raise $15,000 was not a question of "as little" but of "how much."
 
When the drive was finished,  the Bald Eagle project at South Holston Lake had received $17,700 before matching monies were applied.  Eventually the amount raised was $23,000.   It was important that hundreds and hundreds of people, clubs, agencies and companies had participate.
 
Some of the least expected were the Virginia Department of Transportation which raised $500 from their employees and named their bird "Windmaker". Not to be out done,  BBC member Bob Quillen led his division of the Bristol District Office of VDOT and his Right-of-Way Division raised another $500 to name their bird "Zeus."  Quillen is now retired from VDOT.  A public relations officer and cameraman from VDOT in Richmond came to South Holston Lake to interviewed Quillen and another local employee.  The story with photo appeared on the front page of VDOT's statewide employee newspaper.  No one was concerned that this was a Tennessee project and would be conducted in Tennessee.  The Bald Eagle is our national symbol.
 
A fun aspect was a coloring contest which allowed children everywhere to send in an entry and donate $5.00.  They colored a Bald Eagle at a nest.  Three winners in three age groups would be selected and taken by the BBC members to visit the giant eagle hacking tower which was looming over South Holston Lake.  That would be the grand prize.  But the entries came in by the mailbags.  Finally, and additional 10 runner-up "Young Eagle Winners" were selected in each of the three age groups.  Then 119 honorable mentions were selected.  Every winner and their hometowns were listed in the newspapers.  Entries came from across the country.

The coloring contest was judged by birders.   BBC members Alice Nair of the Smyth-Bland Regional Library, Suzanne Larkins a nursing student from Kingsport and BBC member Chris Brown from the Art Department faculty at VI College in Bristol judging the event. 

How amazing is it that the Bald Eagle nest found last year on the Clinch River in Hancock County is just across the river from Suzanne Larkins' family place and she is probably the first birder to have seen that nest ?  How amazing is it that she is a relative of Andy Jones' ?  She has been a longtime hawk watcher at Mendota.  Alice Nair eventually earned a masters degree at VA Tech studying White-eyed Vireo songs. A rental boat company provided a free float boat to take the winning coloring contest children with BBC hosts to see the big tower in early May 1991.
 
Norman Bass of Lebanon, VA, a member of Wildlife Forever out of Minnetonka, MN, had the national organization send a check.  That group also sponsors Grizzly Bear research and restoration for Peregrine Falcons, Trumpeter Swan, Ruffed Grouse and pronghorn.  The family of John I. Cox, an uncle of BBC members Lois Cox and Wilma Boy, adopted the next eagle after the Bristol Bird Club adopted theirs and the Cox family named it "Cherokee."
 
Eagles were adopted by all kinds of interesting companies and persons, including Pittston Coal Group, Bristol Nursing Home, Walling Distributors DeFriece Foundation, H.S. Williams Construction Company, Johnson City Press and Laurel Marina to name a few.
 
Throughout the life of the project,  other contributions came from the Watauga Audubon Society, Bays Mountain Park Commission, Tennessee Eastman Hiking Club, Mountain City Lumber Co., Tennessee Conservation League and Tennessee Valley Authority.
 
When the TWRA wanted to create more possible nesting sites for whatever eagles might return to the area,  they proposed cutting a notch in the crowns of tall evergreen trees at various locations around the lake.  Coffey approached Mike Browder of the Bristol TN electric system and asked for help.  Browder asked Asplund Tree Service out of Willow Grove, PA to help.  They had local climbers volunteer to show up with their chainsaws on a Saturday and the Forest Service directed them to several selected trees around the lake.  They climbed into the tops and cut away the limbs to make a place for nests to be built.  Those location did not turnout to be used.
 
At one point Mitchell D. Tolle, a prominent artist from Kentucky, sold patriotic eagle prints with gold embossed lettering which commemorated the eagle project. He came to Bristol and signed each one for those who bought prints to help fund the project.
 
In late Nov 1990, construction was underway on the massive hacking tower.  A bulldozer was used to help set six large telephone poles that the hack tower would rest upon. Ken Hale used his float boat to take BBC members Lori Shumate, John Shumate, Rick Knight and Coffey to the hack tower on Feb 3, 1991.
 
On Aug 21, 1993, BBC had a field trip to the lake and took other birders to see the tower.  That group included Geoff Larsen, Mike Evans, Mary Evans, Lloyd Jones, Jay Jones, Marge Olson, Jane Fleenor, Mary Erwin, Judy Roach, Karen Musick, Wallace Coffey and Carolyn Coffey.
 
Each bird was marked with a green  wing "badge" with orange numerals.  They wore U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service bird bands.  Each eaglet left the hacking tower with a radio transmitter attached so its progress in getting adjusted to the wild could be monitored.
 
On one late summer afternoon Larry McDaniel and Coffey were on board an eagle hacking project float boat with a Tennessee Tech student at South Holston, monitoring radio signals coming from hacked eagles still at the lake which had not yet begun their late summer dispersal.  They were shocked to come upon a Black Bear swimming out in the middle of the lake near the dam. They made the mistake of pulling the boat directly into the path of the bear to get photos.  Little did they know a bear will climb over anything in its path while swimming.  Bears do not swim around.  Lucky for this birding group,  the big creature didn't get that close.  They followed it to shore and got nice photos.  What saved them was seeing a boat coming in the distant and being worried it might be a wildlife officer who would think the were harassing the bear.  They backed away.
 
In the aftermath of it all, the Daughters of the America Revolution presented Coffey with a national conservation medal for his work with the project.
 
The National Wildlife Federation recognized the Bristol Herald Courier fund-raising effort as one of America's outstanding examples of how "we're coming together" to save the eagle.  The federation selected the fund raising project from among "thousands of stories around the country that dramatically show how people working together stopped the eagle's slide toward extinction and helped it begin its recovery."
 
Coffey was selected as a spokesperson for national news outlets to contact on behalf of the NWF as the eagle was reclassified from endangered to threatened.
 
Eagles soar throughout the region.  They are on eggs at this hour in Kingsport, TN and on the Clinch River in Hancock County.  They are now showing up in rural areas of Southwest Virginia where they have
never before been seen by birders.
 
Eagles have been observed every month of the year at South Holston Lake.
 
That has not always been so.  Members of the BBC can testify to that.
 
from the archives of the Bristol Bird Club

Link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/bristol-birds/01-2008/msg00097.html

One Great Eared Grebe Moment...

Oct 2, 1994. The rarest bird ever found on a Bristol Bird Club field trip over the club's nearly 60 years of history showed up at the end of a float boat birding trip held at South Holston Lake on the first Sunday of October 1994.

A light sprinkle of rain had begun to fall late in the afternoon with dark clouds diminishing prospects of good birding and discouraging a fun trip. Several birders went on to Friendship Marina not far off U.S. 421. It would not hurt to at least show up and see if the trip had been canceled. After all, BBC member Lloyd Jones had gone to a lot of trouble to ask his brother Jay Jones to make available his float boat and get everything ready for the club. Six birders, including Lloyd Jones, who is not shown above because he was taking the photo, surprised one another by their persistence. The trip was declared a go.

It was fun being together. Another BBC field trip was underway. Rain had not chased the hardy little party home. The sprinkle stopped and birders pushed on up the impoundment north of US 421 bridge, beyond Observation Knob Park, and into Spring Creek not far from Musick's Lakeshore Campground.

Nothing worth writing home about was seen as the boat turned back near the Spring Creek Bridge and Va. Rt. 75.

Reaching the main channel, the boat crossed into Tennessee waters and started its return trip. Suddenly a grebe was seen. Everyone knew instantly it was very different than anything expected. For that matter, different than anything seen on South Holston Lake.

Lloyd Jones was the first to call out Eared Grebe. Of course field guides were out so everyone could get a satisfying comparison. All the birders knew this was really special. It was an excellent bird. None of them had seen one in this region of Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.

There was one previous record from almost 20 years prior. Dr. Fred Alsop had found a single bird at Patrick Henry Lake in Sullivan Co., April 3, 1977.

There was much excitement among the South Holston group. Everyone knew it was a great, great bird. No one knew how significant this find would turnout.

The motor was shutoff and the birders poised for their historical photo. No one would want to forget this fun find, this great grebe, this magic moment!

Birders far and wide were surprised. It was immediately broadcast over the "Voice of the Naturalist" Rare Bird Alert (RBA) sponsored by the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Central Atlantic States to birders in Maryland, Virginia, Washington D.C. and Delaware. State internet bird lists were not operating in Tennessee or Virginia at that time. We had nothing like Bristol Birds Net. The Wood Thrush Shop at Nashville, TN soon had it up and running on the Tennessee RBA phone recording.

To access such information, birders telephoned long distance to the RBAs and waited until they could get past the busy signal as birders dialed and dialed to get the latest rare bird reports. It was thrilling to hear the South Holston Lake Eared Grebe report coming over the phone with such fanfare.

Birders gathered around the tape player at the very next meeting of the Bristol Bird Club to enjoy hearing the reports being played back from tapes made from the phone. We knew birders from all over were focused on what we had found. The tape recording is in the BBC archives.

All grew quiet on the Eared Grebe scene. But not for long. An almost unbelievable event awaited us just months away.

BBC member Mary Jane Erwin of Kingsport and her friend Gerald Johnson of Birmingham saw another Eared Grebe at the same location one year to the date of the first on Oct. 2, 1995. They did not know the can of worms they were opening. We were all astonished. How amazing was this ? What did this mean ?

Birders swarmed over the area. Five days later Rob Biller and Larry McDaniel found EIGHT there on Oct 7. That was a state record high count ! The next day Judy Musick of Marion, VA and McDaniel discovered the birds in Washington County, VA waters.

Karen Quesenbery, Ramsey White, Ron Carrico, Marty Hubber, Jo Anne Detta, Rick Knight, Frank Ward, Gary Wallace, Larry Routledge, James Brooks and Audrey Hoff of Knoxville were soon among the those flocking to get a look or get a new state bird or new life bird.

In November, the Eared Grebes were still being found and birders were now making trips in from several neighboring states. On the 12th there had been a record NINE found. On that day Bonita Frazier, Mark Frazier, Louise Tilson, Coffey, David Trently of Knoxville, Mark Churchill of Athens, GA, Andy Jones, Carrico and Biller were there to establish the record.

The Washington DC based Voice of the Naturalist was now suggesting that the species would winter there. Local birders were pondering if it would be possible to get an Eared Grebe on the Bristol Christmas Bird Count.

Hmmmm ?

It happened a month later on Dec. 28 with 6 Eared Grebes on the count. Spirits were high ! They were there again this year when Rick Knight saw three on the 2007 count. The grebes have been seen on six of the CBCs since then with the high count being 10 birds in 2005.

But wait ! There's more !

The maximum count at South Holston is 21 Eared Grebes seen Oct 9,1996 at Musick's Campground by Rob Biller, Ron Carrico, Wallace Coffey and Larry McDaniel. That is a state record high count for the species in both Tennessee and Virginia.

Coffey and Chris O'Bryan found two bird 31 Aug 2004 at Musick's Campground, representing the earliest fall record. McDaniel and Coffey saw a bird in full breeding plumage at South Holston in May.

Eared Grebes have awaited birders at Musick's Campground every year for 14 consecutive winters since 1994. How long does this continue ?

Archives of the Bristol Bird Club.

Link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/bristol-birds/01-2008/msg00083.html

Sep 9, 1994, living off of BBC's success with having a "Baby Bald Eagle" float in the Bristol Jaycees 4th of July downtown parade, the club had the hit entry in the South Holston Lake boat regatta along with 70 other crafts during the Autum Chase Festival event.

We cut large branches from trees and decorated the boat to make it appear as a "floating" eagle nest. Featured was a costumed replica of an eaglet on board. Other boaters came throughout the evening to show their children the baby eagle and to take photos of the float. The evening was topped off with a roaring fire on the shoreline near the concert and fireworks where we cooked out. Firewood was hauled on the boat to the cookout site along with folding chairs for all.

Aug 1998, BBC won "first place" for its NASCAR-themed float boat entry in the Racefest Regatta. BBC featured a live band aboard a paddle wheel boat at South Holston Lake. The band entertained thousands at the fireworks show. Hundreds of boats pulled together with the BBC boat tied in the middle. Featuring a saxaphone, the band played the National Anthem over the reflections of boat lights and sky-dancing fireworks. For more than an hour the band played requests and popular hits of the past.

Birder John Shumate was the head chef. During the evening members enjoyed a cookout on the boat with sit down dinning at tables.

Birders joined a large flotilia of boats returning to the docks late at night thru the darkness. The procession was led by Tennessee wildlife officers with their patrol boat, complete with flashing blue lights. It was a charming full moon night.

The chief of police of Bristol Tennessee and his wife attended the event as invited and honored guest of BBC and spent the evening on the BBC boat. The chief's wife, Angela, has been typesetting The Migrant, journal of the Tennessee Ornithological Society, for more than 30 years. The Wamplers are casual birders. She is an editorial assistant for the TOS publication.

From the archives of the Bristol Bird Club