Vancouver city workers repair pathetic eagle's nest

For five years, a pair of eagles has used a platform built by Vancouver city workers as their nest.

Every year, at least one eaglet has fallen to its death from the nestnear LocarnoBeach. When it was originally built, it was expected that the eagles would add to the platform, creating a better nest.

"It was never properly quite dressed with branches on the outside that the eagles could hold onto, and the young chicks were blowing off in the breeze and in their exercising had nothing to root themselves on," explained eagle expert David Hancock.

Arboristswith the Vancouver Park Board climbed the 30-metre Douglas fir on Tuesday to improve the situation. A team including Alex Rothbauer, Justin Temple,Tatton Zanardo, park board biologist Nick Page and Hancock came up with the plan to stabilize the nest.

Eagles are messy eaters.

A mess of bones, wings, feathers and debris could be found beneath the sturdy Douglas fir.

"What we were seeing is a lot of wings and feathers from particularly from some gulls, seagulls that they've probably been predating, not just picking off as carrion," said Page.

"We saw lots of fishbones, everything from what looked like some sharks and some codand things like that, some lingcodand then some stuff that you'd only find in urban environments."

Each year, the nest has seen casualties.

Hancock and the Park Board have been monitoring the nest since it was built by a team of cityarborists, which includedJody Taylor who tragically died on the job earlier this year.

"Generally, most nests don't lose [a chick], but this nest, every year lost one or two chicks for falling offor blowing off," said Hancock.

"These are not big house-building parents, partly because it's a platform. There's nothing to hold their sticks on and the wind blows them all off."

The park board snapped these photos of one of the eagles feeding its young on the aluminum-framed platformin May, 2013.

City arborists don't usually spend their days building birds' nests.

"It's pretty easy.I'm going to fasten larger pieces and then start weaving smaller pieces in and then just take it as it comes," saidpark board arborist Alex Rothbauer, as though he'd done it before (he hadn't).

Fellow tree-climber Justin Temple hasdone a few bird-related jobs in his time as an arborist, but he'd never built an eagle's nest before Tuesday.

"I've done a couple wildlife structures, bird boxes, osprey platforms, stuff like that," he said. "Eagle's nest is a little bit more of the typical shape of what you'd envision a nest is. Like, an osprey platform is just flat, a bird box is a box, so this is going to be my first clich nest."

"Usually, we're pruning for the structure of the tree and health and safety of the public, so this is a little different in that regard," said Temple.

But first, Temple and Rothbauer had to climb the tree using climbing spurs big spikes strapped to the inside of each ankle to dig into the bark.

The park board's efforts are all part of getting Vancouveritescloser to nature.

"As much as we're living in the city and we love our urban coffee places, breweriesand everything, people really have a connection to the wildlife in the city," said Page.

"People are really proud of it.It's sort of part of Vancouver's identity as well, that we're the city really on the edge of wilderness, and I think this interest in eagles really speaks to that."

Workers hoisted prepared cedar boughs up to the nesting platform.

Once Rothbauer and Temple were at the top of their climb, they fixed a rope to hoistthe nesting materials, beginning with large branches, to carefully attach the edges of the platform.

Fellow arboristTatton Zanardo stayed on the ground,set up the loads and did a lot of the heavy lifting.

After the solid outer branches, the smaller pieces were hauled up the tree andcarefully put into place.

Once that was complete, the workers were satisfied that they'd left the bald eagles with a comfortableand much safer nest to return to.

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