Bill Bowerman, Bald Eagle Researcher The bald eagle. It’s our national bird and the symbol of the Eagle Scout Award. But it’s also, according to Bill Bowerman, Ph.D., an important sentinel species and key wildlife biomonitor. “Eagles are very sensitive indicators of the health of the environment,” he says. That’s why Bowerman, an Eagle Scout and active Scouting volunteer, has dedicated his career to studying the bird in the wild. Each summer since 1986, he has led teams to Michigan to study young eagles. Traveling to nest sites across the state, the scientists first lower the birds to the ground in bags. They then weigh and measure the birds to determine age and gender, collect a blood sample to test for contaminants like DDT, and pluck a couple of feathers to test for mercury before returning the birds to the nest. They even check the birds’ crops (which can be as large as a grapefruit) to see what they’ve been eating. Over the course of six weeks, they visit 3 to 5 nest sites a day and test up to 150 eagles. When Bowerman was growing up in Munising, Mich., a small town on the shore of Lake Superior, visiting more than 3 to 5 nests in an entire summer might have been difficult. Just a few years after DDT had been banned, eagles were struggling and still on the endangered species list. “In the Upper Peninsula, there were really only three nest sites that were producing young,” Bowerman says. Since then, the bird has made a dramatic recovery and is no longer endangered. When he served on the Northern States Bald Eagle Recovery Team, the goal was to have 1,200 breeding pairs in the 28 states from Maine to Maryland to Missouri to Montana. Today, Michigan alone has over 800 pairs, and Wisconsin and Minnesota have over 2,500 pairs each. Risks remain, however. For example, eagles within 8 kilometers of the Great Lakes show higher levels of PCBs in their tissue and are less productive than birds that nest in more interior regions. Moreover, Bowerman says, “What we’re finding is that the eagles are nesting earlier and earlier each year, most likely an indicator of climate change.”
funding. Eighteen months later, Bowerman’s research was funded, and he was working on his master ’s degree at Northern Michigan University. Two years later, he completed his Ph.D. at Michigan State. When he’s not teaching, doing research, and chairing the University of Maryland’s Department of Environmental Science & Technology, Bowerman serves as vice-president Bill Bowerman of outdoor adventures Credit: University of Maryland for the National Capital Area Council. A chance encounter in that role led to a special connection between his research and the BSA. At one of the council’s “Eagles on the Hill” events, Bowerman met Mike Manyak, M.D., who oversees the NESA World Explorers Program, an ongoing program that sends young Eagle Scouts out on scientific expeditions. Manyak easily convinced Bowerman to host a couple of participants during last summer’s field season, and so Connor Hodges of Scituate, Mass., and Austin Katzer of Plano, Texas, spent two weeks working with Bowerman and his team. “These two young men were amazing,” Bowerman says. “They weren’t afraid of anything.” In fact, Bowerman has already committed to having World Explorer Program participants join his research team next year. “If the quality of the students that applied last year is any indication of what we’ll get next year, I’m all for it,” he says. “They’re great.” And who knows? Perhaps one of those Scouts will follow in Bowerman’s footsteps and continue his research for another three decades.
Bowerman’s work with eagles started when, as an undergraduate at Western Michigan University, he wrote a research proposal. His professor, Richard Brewer, Ph.D., convinced him to go to graduate school and pursue research 14
