Coming home: Decorah eagle D1 tracked to the north and back again

After a nearly two-month sojourn in northwest Wisconsin, the young Decorah eagle packing a satellite transmitter on her back appears to be headed home.

D1, as she's called, “is definitely on the move, and she's heading back south,” said Bob Anderson, director of the Raptor Resource Project, whose nest-cam website was visited more than 200 million times this year as viewers worldwide watched the wired eaglet and her two brothers grow up.

D1, which signifies Decorah first satellite, was fitted with a satellite transmitter on July 12 to help Anderson and other researchers learn what becomes of young northern eagles after they leave the nest.

For more than a month she stayed close to home at the Decorah Fish Hatchery, finally leaving the area on Aug. 14.

Her subsequent travels have been a daily source of wonder and revelation for Anderson, who has been engaged in raptor recovery and research projects for the past 40 years.

After appearing to have settled in late August near Yellow Lake in northwest Wisconsin, more than 200 miles north of her parents' nest, she suddenly went north again, finally stopping Sept. 6 west of Lake Superior in far northeastern Minnesota.

Just when it appeared she might be heading for Canada, she reversed course and returned to the Yellow Lake area.

There she was regularly monitored by an eagle expert who used Anderson's tracking equipment to follow her movements.

That expert, who declined to be identified to avoid a flood of phone calls from “eagle-holics,” reported that D1 regularly socialized with other immature and adult bald eagles living around Yellow Lake and that, as evidenced by her frequently distended crop, appeared to be finding plenty to eat.

The expert photographed her there on Sept. 27, and a Burlington, Wis., woman photographed her on Oct. 5.

“After following the eagle story and knowing we'd be vacationing at Yellow Lake, we kept a keen eye out for the young eagle,” Barbara McCown said in a note to Anderson.

Finding and photographing her, McCown wrote, “was quite a joy to experience.”

D1 left Yellow Lake on Oct. 15 and has since been traveling south. As of Wednesday, she was about 80 miles from Decorah.

Anderson said he is looking forward to monitoring D1 with his own eyes, rather than through the wonders of a solar-powered satellite transmitter.

Although the batteries weaken on cloudy days, the tracking system has performed flawlessly, he said.

Each day at 6:02 a.m., Anderson checks his computer for the latest latitude and longitude coordinates, which he plugs into the Google Earth program. “Often I can see the exact tree she was sitting in,” he said.

Anderson said only time will tell where D1's travels will take her.

“My guess is that she will spend the winter around open water, probably along the Mississippi River,” he said.

Acknowledging the difficulty of predicting her movements, however, Anderson said when D1 left home in August he and other experts had speculated that she would head for the nearest farm with livestock or to the Mississippi River.

“We've all been surprised and amazed by her northern wanderings,” he said.

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