Rehabilitated King Eider breaks age record

16/01/2020

An extraordinary ringing recovery has been confirmed as the oldest-known King Eider on record – at some 24 years old.

To add to the remarkable nature of the record, the bird – a drake – was rescued as an adult during an oil spill in Alaska in 1996 and was cared for after this environmental disaster by International Bird Rescue, surviving 23 years after its rehabilitation and release. It was found recently deceased in 2019. The finding proves that rehabilitated, formerly oiled birds can survive many years after treatment and release back to the wild.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and US Geological Survey (USGS) Bird Banding Lab, the previous oldest King Eider was a healthy female that was at least 22 years and one month old when she was recaptured in Nunavut, Canada.

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Nation's oldest bald eagle - a Minnesotan - dead at 38 - via Doug Shoop

Bob Collins June 17, 2015, 2:59 PM3

If you’re the dean of American bald eagles, your life should conclude more gloriously than by getting hit by a car in the middle of nowhere while you’re dining on a freshly-killed rabbit.

A name wouldn’t be a bad idea either. But that’s the fate that struck 0629-03142, officials have determined. He was the oldest living bald eagle — 38 years old — when he died in upstate New York a week and a half ago, struck by a car in Henrietta, N.Y.

The leg band on the oldest documented bald eagle.
 N.Y. Department of Environmental Conservation

He was one of us — a Minnesotan who, like a lot of Minnesotans, moved away at a young age after an initial upbringing in northern Minnesota in the mid-’70s.

“We hired a tree climber, who climbed up white pines, 80 to 90 feet, to eagle’s nests, put a chick in cloth bag and lowered it by rope to the ground,” Carrol Henderson, former head of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources nongame wildlife program, tells the Star Tribune. “We always took just one chick from a nest, and left a healthy chick.”

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