Golden Eagle Research Update

GBBO’s Golden Eagle investigations are continuing this year with another successful monitoring season of nest sites in Nevada completed. We are partnering with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, who has tagged several Golden Eagles with satellite transmitters to study their habitat use and home ranges in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, as well as with UNR graduate student Zachary Ormsby, who is interested in how Golden Eagles fare in the urban-rural transition. As part of our expanded research of Golden Eagles, we are installing nest cams to determine what prey items the parents bring to their nests to feed their young. And in an exciting cross-over with another GBBO project, we have also started to use our Nevada Bird Count crews to collect monitoring data on black-tailed jackrabbits, which is one of the most important prey items of Golden Eagles. During prolonged droughts such as the current one, it is particularly important to know what prey items are used by eagles in order to optimize land management toward these prey species, which ultimately ensures survivorship in the long-lived Golden Eagle.