I've no doubt missed some relevant details that go with this story, but from what I've read and heard thus far, it ain't adding up. I followed a bald eagle study on the Skagit River in the late 1970s. Wintering bald eagles in this area are certainly strongly associated with chum salmon runs, generally because the chum have been an abundant and easily accessed food resource. However, it would be incorrect to say that the bald eagles are dependent on chum salmon runs. The eagles are opportunistic scavengers, and hunters if necessary.

One year during the Skagit study, the chum escapement was low, and flooding washed away a majority of the carcasses that would have been available. The eagles responded by increasing the range in which they scavange and hunt. Skagit eagles searched the Nooksack and lower Fraser trubutaries for alternate chum salmon. But if chum were scarce region wide, as the above article suggests, the eagles simply widened their search area further. Tagged eagles from Skagit gravel bars ventured further south where they were found preying on wounded water fowl at the huge Klamath wildlife management area. Eagles are highly mobile and don't seem to be choosy about what they eat, altho they have a decided preference for whatever requires the least energy expenditure.

For these local regional eagles to be dropping out of the sky, dead from starvation suggests that these eagles have become so strongly associated with chum salmon that they don't have the adaptability to search other areas for alternate food sources. One possibility that occurs to me is that there are so many more eagles than there were 20 and 30 years ago, that like a popular predator-prey relationship, the eagles have grown so numerous from many years of good winter food abundance that they have now outstripped the combined total sources of winter feed of various types over a very wide area from southern BC to northern California. I'm skeptical, but it's possible.

Sg