Late February: A friend took us to a site where Bald Eagles have a communal roost, on private land near Sandusky Bay. The evening that we were there, over 100 eagles came in, a few at a time, in the last hour before dusk. Evidently the birds spend the day hunting over a wide area of the waters and marshes of Sandusky Bay and the Lake Erie shoreline, and at dusk they come back to this protected spot, in tall trees far from roads or houses.
This is a seasonal roost, according to our friend, occupied only from mid-February to mid-March. We know that we see numbers of Bald Eagles migrating west-northwest along the Lake Erie shore in early spring. The presence of this established roost makes me think that the birds are arriving from farther south, staging in this area for a few weeks, then going on to the north. By this date, the local eagles here in Ohio are already on nests; many of the birds using this roost are young birds that won't be breeding this year.
