Fuel cost puts end to study of raptors

ENTIAT, Wash. – A banding program to monitor migration of hawks and other raptors has fallen prey to high gasoline prices.

Over the past seven years volunteers from Falcon Research Group of Bellingham have gone to Entiat Ridge and banded 2,010 raptors, mostly sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper’s hawks

As many as 50 volunteers, mostly from Western Washington, typically participated in trapping, banding and releasing the birds daily from late August to mid-October.

Group founder Bud Anderson said the plan was to document 10 years of migratory patterns at Entiat Ridge, up the Eagle Creek drainage northeast of Leavenworth, but was abandoned this fall after one volunteer supervisor estimated the cost at $800 just for gasoline.

“It’s just getting too expensive,” Anderson said.

“When we got started, gas was a buck a gallon and people were willing to do it,” he said. “Now it’s over $4 a gallon, and that’s asking a lot of our volunteers.”

Entiat Ridge was an ideal location because it is the longest continual ridge in the state, Anderson said

A similar project operated by HawkWatch International and the U.S. Forest Service on Chelan Ridge, however, will continue.

Anderson, a raptor biologist, began banding the birds of prey in Washington in the early 1970s, including the first banding of hawks in the Cascades in 1976. He started Falcon Research Group in 1985 mostly to help conserve raptors and educate the public.

He said the program provided valuable information to the Bird Banding Laboratory, a government agency that has kept data on raptors captured and banded in the U.S. for nearly 90 years.

“One of my main goals with the project was to allow people the opportunity to catch and handle hawks safely,” he said. “That turns them into conservationists who then start thinking about habitat. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”