Great photos Jack. I assume they are mostly fish eaters? We don't get them here but we do have our own ospreys (a bit smaller) and now our equivalent of yours, the White-tailed or Sea Eagle - about 8 feet in wingspan. The latter have been re-introduced in NW Scotland over the past few years, the original population having been exterminated by gamekeepers over 100 years ago. And those were the days when Victorian bird collectors wanted specimens of nearly everything, to have them stuffed for their collections. Some of those exhibits, in their glass cases, still exist and are, I suspect, quite valuable today - though I greatly disapprove of anything like that these days.
There was a proposal not long ago to try to introduce Sea Eagles into East Anglia, but there was an understandable reaction from the farmers - whatever the "birdie boys" may like to pretend, there would have been lambs taken. So I think the idea is on hold for now ...
Moving onto the subject of bird predation, we in UK have a major organisation which supports bird life, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It enjoys huge public support, rightly so, but I think it is much less than honest when it comes to acknowledging the huge damage caused to, say, song birds by predators such as crows, magpies, jays, grey squirrels et al. If the RSPB were to spend only a fraction of its very substantial income on employing keepers to control the number of these predators, there would be very many more of the smaller species surviving. Yes, kill crows, kill magpies and jays, and we'd all have a lot more bird life to enjoy!
Tony I assume they are mostly fish eaters because I don't see them inland. The woods and fields get red tailed hawks, peregrine falcons, owls etc but never bald eagles from what I've seen.
Along with the return of the eagles we have also seen vultures return in large numbers. We have a lot of deer, and a lot of road kill that the vultures like. We also have more bear, foxes, timber rattlers and now even bobcats (not to forget the random moose). Hiking got a lot more "interesting" the past few years.
I don't think we in UK can compete with N America in terms of variety Jack, but we do pretty well for our size, perhaps because of our diversity of habitat. Our peregrines were in a precarious state some years ago but with a ban on some of the worst pesticides (which were ingested by smaller birds and then further ingested by the peregrines which preyed on them) the UK population is now healthy again. Unfortunately our sparrowhawks benefited in the same way, to the cost of the huge numbers of songbirds which they kill annually - the former should be the subject of serious culling by the keepers which the RSPB should be employing if they really cared for balanced bird populations.
We have far larger numbers of deer than most town-dwellers imagine and the fox population is flourishing following the emotive-driven ban on hunting (foxes are now controlled by poisoning and shooting, which together cause far more painful and lingering deaths than the brutal, but rapid, deaths that hunting ever did). But the ignorant human urban population here seems satisfied that the ban is a good thing, since they don't fully understand the realities of the countryside (I've nevertheless heard rumours that in certain of our cities young men are using their dogs - bull terriers/rotties? - to conduct their own form of hunting with urban foxes the prey).
Anyway, again great photos. I much look forward to seeing one of our own sea eagles in the Hebrides this coming summer. They too are mainly fish eaters but they won't pass up a hare or a sickly lamb if it offers. As a further aside, I once knew a man who took a young golden eagle from its nest (eyrie) in Benbecula many years ago (highly illegal now). He reared it and later sold it to James Robertson Justice, a large, ebullient British film actor of 50 years ago.
In my ignorance I thought sturgeon were confined to the Black Sea. And I vaguely remember a song which went - "a virgin sturgeon needs no urgin' ", perhaps someone on the site can give us the rest?
The pesticide/peregrine issue in UK is similar to causes of Bald Eagle decline in US. No surprise all thse birds are rebounding.
There are about 100,000 sturgeon in the Hudson. Many are in the bay I posted, and in the highland region (entrance shown in photo) where the water is deep. The highland region is also a fjord - one of few in North America. The Hudson is also an estuary and a major fish breeding ground for whole Atlantic.
Well it was the increase in deer that kicked everything off. When I was a kid I would see a deer maybe once or twice a year - and it would be while in a car traveling in the country. Now I see them daily and they romp through everyone's yard. They don't even fear people anymore and you can get within a few feet of them. One reason for that increase is the lack of hunting - most New York area counties ban it to one degree or another. The deer brought more natural predators. We have coyotes everywhere now too (six went into Manhattan last year). Its funny but a lot of "experts" say the increase in wildlife was caused by people destroying animal habitats but the animals clearly like the suburbs. I rarely see racoons, skunks, deer in the woods but they are all over the school fields, yards, sewers etc. Saying animals are moving into towns and suburbs because they are fleeing development is a bit like saying people in Canada move to Alaska because they don't like snow lol. Speaking of snow this year were were flooded with snowy owls too and they were inhabiting New York airports and shores.
It does look cold there... If I was a bird I think I'd prefer to fly to the Bahamas for winter!
Yes we got a lot of arctic air ("polar vortex" officially) from our Canadian friends this year. The ice cutters were very busy keeping shipping lane open. Bahamas sound good to me. I don't know why eagles would come here in winter and leave when its warm. As I understand it Florida has he most Eagle fledglings. Eagles return to the place they were born so I suppose we will just get more and more of them each winter.