Canonsburg Lake photographers follow breeding pair amid comeback for bald eagles
Courtesy of Rich McPeek
A great blue heron stands in shallow water at Canonsburg Lake.
Courtesy of Rich McPeek
A Cooper’s hawk rests on a tree branch in this photo taken in February near the Canonsburg Lake dam.
Courtesy of Rich McPeek
The Canonsburg Lake eagles sit on a tree branch during a January snowfall.
Bald eagles are opportunists.
Perhaps undermining their own image in the public imagination as flying avatars of noble patriotism, the avian apex predators will kill or scavenge pretty much whatever they can get their talons around. In addition to fish, a staple of their diet, they’ll take raccoons, snakes, smaller birds and even other species’ kills.
This is the sort of thing Rich McPeek – who’s been going to Canonsburg Lake for years to photograph the breeding pair that nests there – knows firsthand.
“The eagles would prefer to steal their meals from something else,” McPeek said. “I’ve seen them go after the osprey, chase the osprey and when the osprey drops the fish they go after the fish.”
The 51-year-old, who lives nearby in Peters Township, is one of the administrators of the Canonsburg Lake Eagles. The Facebook group has drawn more than 3,650 members since it was founded by John Buswell three years ago, not long before the pair laid their first eggs there.
McPeek said he and two fellow photographers, Joe Ciferno Jr. and Karen Sturgeon, mostly run the group now, frequently sharing images of the eagles and other wildlife.
“Osprey should be coming up in the next week,” McPeek said. “They tend to hang out at Peters Lake because the eagles don’t go there.”
One of his recent posts is a photograph of a great blue heron, its bill agape, standing on rocks as water rushes around its legs.
The Army veteran spent his childhood in western New York, and used to hunt with his grandfather. He doesn’t hunt anymore, but said he uses the same skills for wildlife photography.
“The main thing we tell people is, just pick a spot, sit still and wait,” McPeek said.
The Canonsburg Lake pair laid two eggs in 2017. When they hatched, one of the fledglings was killed when it flew into some power lines. The other got hurt somehow, so the state Game Commission caught it and took it to a sanctuary to rehabilitate it before releasing it into the wild. The couple laid another egg in 2018, and two last year. McPeek said they laid at least one egg this year, too.
Jim Bonner, executive director of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania, said that eagles have made a comeback throughout the western region of the state in the last dozen or so years. Fish are the major part of their diet, so cleaning up waterways has helped to bring them back to the area.
DDT – a toxic insecticide that wasn’t banned until the early 1970s – affected the birds, too, since they’re at the top of the food chain. Bonner said the synthetic compound interfered with the mothers’ ability to use calcium, so they laid soft-shelled eggs that broke when the birds tried to incubate them.
The elimination of DDT and cleaner water helped the birds make a comeback throughout the state, and particularly in areas of Western Pennsylvania where they wouldn’t have been spotted before. The popular Hays Bald Eagle Cam, a joint venture of CSE Corp. and the Audubon Society, keeps tabs on the first bald eagle nest in Pittsburgh in 150 years. The pair lives and breeds on the Monongahela River in the eastern area of the city.
Bonner said there are differences between the “more traditional” photographers and bird watchers. Like McPeek and the friends he’s made by going to Canonsburg Lake, the die-hards of that group tend to be people who’re willing to wait for hours, often in the wet and cold, for an opportunity. They need high-quality cameras and lenses.
Devotees of the Hays and other nest cameras are “no less passionate,” Bonner said, but their interests tend to be different. Watching the birds and their eggs up close, they’re more likely to anthropomorphize – project human emotions and other characteristics – onto the eagles.
However people become interested in them, Bonner said, eagles are so well known and easily recognized that they can serve as a good way to get people interested in nature. For example, robins are smaller and more common, but have their life cycles right in people’s backyards.
McPeek said he’s still surprised by some who often kayak and fish at Canonsburg Lake but don’t realize that eagles are there. He said the birds wouldn’t be there if they weren’t comfortable with the noise and people in the surroundings, but he hopes people avoid harassing or chasing the birds.
“For the most part, everybody’s very respectful to the eagle,” he said. “Which is important to us.”