2018 by the Numbers! #GivingTuesday #Budget

To help kick-off Giving Tuesday on Tuesday, November 27, we wanted to talk about what we did this year. Here are the things that your donations got done. Please donate to the Raptor Resource Project to help us continue our work in 2019 and beyond!

New Projects
In 2018, we expanded our educational partnerships with Neil Rettig Productions and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, partnered with the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge and the Brice Prairie Conservation Association on a new Mississippi River Flyway Cam, and built a starter nest after the Decorah North Eagle nest collapsed. We:

• Began a kestrel cam in collaboration with Neil Rettig Productions and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. The cam gave us an intimate look at the lives of nesting kestrels, including hatch, eyass behavior, prey and prey transfers, parental care, and so much more! You can see highlights from this year's nest on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/RaptorResourceProject/.  During the nesting season, it can be watched here: https://www.raptorresource.org/birdcams/american-kestrels/. 
• Partnered with the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge and the Brice Prairie Conservation Association on a new Mississippi River Flyway Cam. This camera is located on an island in the middle of Lake Onalaska in the Mississippi River and has given watchers an unparalleled look at resident and migrating birds, including Bald Eagles, Sandhill Cranes, Tundra Swans, American White Pelicans, and many other species of birds. That cam can be watched here and here. Speaking personally? I can't tear myself away! I don't know what it will look like in the winter, but it has been simply amazing this fall!
• Built a new starter nest for the Decorah North Eagles after their nest collapsed during a torrential rainstorm in August. The eagles appear to have adopted it and are putting their signature touches on in the form of branches, corn husks and grasses.  

Online Interaction and Education
We also kept busy with our online interaction and education program! Since January 1, 2018, we have:

• Provided over 1,785 hours of chat on the Decorah eagles channel, including 449 hours of dedicated educational chat. Our Decorah North group provided 576 hours of moderated chat. 
• Posted 406 times on Facebook. Topics and photos included the Decorah Eagles, the Decorah North Eagles, the GSB Peregrine Falcons, the Fort St. Vrain Eagles, tracking D27, Robin Brumm's trips to Decorah, Peregrine Falcon banding, nest box work, and many other topics related to our nests and birds. Posts were shared from Neil Rettig Productions, SOAR, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Jim Brandenberg's 365 Nature project, and several fan pages. 
• Written 11 blogs and 43 articles on our web site. We reported on and addressed questions about the eagles, the nests, nest intruders, eaglet growth and development, Dad's disappearance, the arrival of new males, eagle ID, prey remains in the nest, and the events at the Decorah North Nest. 
• Completed our move to Explore.org and moved chat to our website. Our partnership with Explore has allowed us to increase stream quality, drop advertising, and serve content to an ever-growing array of devices, phones, tablets, phablets, and computers. The Decorah Eagles, Decorah North Eagles, Great Spirit Bluff falcons, and Mississippi Flyway Cam can be watched at Explore or on our website at www.raptorresource.org. We're also developing a Field Guide and some reporting tools so you can learn about and report on all of the birds and goings-on around our nests! 
• We're looking at ways to grow our educational outreach in 2019, including offering more downloadable curriculum, educational videos, and reporting tools.

I need to give a shout out to our amazing volunteer moderators. Let me be very clear - our volunteers make our pages the best on the web and we could not provide our chat or online educational program without their help! They have educated people, comforted people, and welcomed them into a wider circle of eagle friends. We thank them for everything they do!

Monitoring, Banding, and Recovery
Our peregrine falcon program is key part of who we are and what we do! In 2018, we:

• Monitored over 50 peregrine falcon and bald eagle nest sites and potential territories in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Colorado.
• Banded 72 falcons at 38 sites in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois between May 24 and July 11th! Our northernmost territory was in Cohasset, Minnesota and our southernmost territory was in Peoria, Illinois. As always, we reported all banding and follow up data to the Bird Banding Lab and the Midwest Peregrine Society. Our northernmost site on the Saint Croix River (Arcola Mills) came online this year, and we're hoping the Root River site is productive next year. Both of these sites are historical eyries that have been empty since the mid-1950s.
• Followed D27! She spent the summer in Ontario before returning home to the Decorah area in September. 

Thanks to our utility, industrial, and landowner partners for all of their help and support! A huge thanks to Brett Mandernack for including 'our' eagles in his studies and for sharing all of the data about their whereabouts and fates. Thanks also to David and Ann Lynch and Brian Malaise for their help with the transmitter project. We couldn't do it without all of you!

Camera Research and Installation
John Howe, Kike (Enrique or Kee-Kay) Arnal, Amy Ries, David Kester, Richard Meredith, John Dingley, Neil Rettig, and Laura Johnson installed a total of six cameras and six microphones at N1, N2B, Decorah North, Lake Onalaska (the Flyway cam), and two kestrel nestboxes near Prairie Du Chien, WI and at Xcel Energy's Pawnee facility in Brush, CO. We upgraded to 4K cameras at N1, N2B, and Decorah North, installed a 4K camera in Lake Onalaska, and cleaned the cameras and collected prey remains at the Fort St. Vrain eagle nest.  We did our three eagle cam sites between August 20 and September 29th, when the eagles are at their loosest point of attachment to their nests. It was a busy season but the upgrades in video and sound were well worth it, and we can't stop watching the new Mississippi Flyway cam! The installations took roughly 1050 hours total. Thanks to the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Brice Prairie Conservation Association for their help with the Flyway Cam!

Watchers might remember that we installed a new nest box at Great Spirit Bluff last year. This year, two falcons hatched and, thanks to the fan John installed, we had no problems with blackfly-related mortality or jumping! While this design can't be used everywhere, we were very pleased with its performance in our first year and will look at adopting the open-back design and possibly a fan in more nest boxes. John Howe put in hundreds of hours researching, ordering, and testing cameras this year. While the majority of our installs are done in September and October, camera and streaming research take place year-round.

Other Stuff

• We threw our annual After The Fledge party between July 19 and July 21. Over 100 eagle fans and volunteers had a blast celebrating the Decorah eagles and Decorah itself! Despite the challenging weather, attendees enjoyed a bike ride, kayaking, a Meet and Greet at the Winneshiek Hotel, a talk at Luther, a dinner at the Hatchery, and a great boat ride on Sunday, with excellent entertainment from Big Blue Sky! 
• We upgraded our website and our live streams to give users a safer, easier, and faster way to watch our eagles and falcons on a variety of platforms, including mobile devices and tablets! We committed to explore.org. moved our chat to our website, added chat at Decorah North, and are currently looking at ways to make our website even more friendly to phones, tablets, phablets, and devices. 
• We added new remote volunteer camera operators to increase our coverage. This has given us new insights into the lives and habitat of the birds we watch!  

Our Budget
In 2018, our annual expenses are hovering around $271,600 per year. They break down like this:

• Staff and contractor compensation will cost an estimated $146,700 this year. We pay for a director, two busy regular contractors (Amy and Dave), an extremely important climber and camera installer (Mr. Arnal), two master banders, and additional people as needed. We are committed to paying a fair wage for work, which means that everyone we contract with is compensated at a living wage or better. 
• Camera equipment and IT expenses – cameras, microphones, cables, encoders, software, licensing fees, website costs, and so on – will come in at around $42,100. HD and 4K cameras are amazing, brilliant, and breathtaking…but they don’t come cheap. Software licensing and IT expenses continue to rise as we bring more camera operators on and do everything we can to make sure our website and streams are watchable on a variety of devices, secure, encrypted, and always up. Watchers will remember that our website was attacked in April of this year. We dealt with it, but dealing with it and preventing further attacks costs money!
• Office and field supplies – paper, printer expenses, new ropes, slings, rappelling tools, hardware, zip ties, screws, silicon gel, rope bags, harnesses, lumber, paint, tape, bands, banding equipment, and trapping equipment – will cost about $7,500. Given all the trips we made to the hardware store this year, I think it’s a pretty good deal (I said this last year, but it is still true)! Several of us also pay for our own climbing equipment instead of having RRP do it, which helps keep expenses lower and gives Amy a great excuse to go shopping. Although she discovered a rope in safe storage this fall that should keep rope expenses down in the year to come.
• Office and land rental fees cost $7,500.
• We can’t work or drive the company vehicle without insurance! Although it isn’t nearly as exciting a topic as eagles or falcons, John did an excellent job negotiating insurance, which will cost us $1,300 this year. This was a decrease from last year, and we have better coverage, too! Other things I would put in the necessary-but-ho-hum category include vehicle expenses ($4,500), fundraising fees and gifts ($6,000), accounting ($4,000), postage and delivery ($5000 – and that’s with the non-profit rate!), and our endowment funding ($20,000 and please consider donating to the Bob Anderson Memorial Scholarship fund). 
• Travel and meetings cost us $8,000. While this might sound expensive, Amy alone put over 30,000 RRP-related miles on last year. This number would be much higher if Amy and John didn’t donate a significant amount of their travel. Although we don’t usually go too far from home, we put a lot of miles on during banding and camera season! Was it higher than we projected last year? It was, and might be again!
• Printing and copying isn’t cheap! We’re projecting a total of $12,000 for this year. That includes a large newsletter printings, all of our thank you letters and envelopes, and any printing related to talks, events, and presentations.
• Speaking of events, After the Fledge will cost about $1,500 this year. You should come next year – it is a great celebration of our eagles!
• And finally, grants to partner organizations will total $10,000.

Our income is generated by a combination of donations from viewers, grants from corporate partners, and a grant from the Iowa DNR’s Conservation Education program that supported our Hawk Hill Banding Station in 2017 and 2018. But donations from viewers like you remain our biggest single source of income. We sincerely appreciate your generosity and support of the Raptor Resource Project mission. Would you please help us make a difference with your donation? Thank you so much for your support and we hope you enjoy watching in 2019!

A Reflection and A Thanksgiving

November 23rd would have been Bob Anderson's birthday. I assume that our friend and founder would finally have achieved his dream of retirement - or at least semi-retirement - and be busy with his book by now. Given the thankful nature of the season, it seems like a good time to take stock of where the Raptor Resource Project has been, where it plans on going, and what I have to be thankful for.

For those of you who don't know, Bob founded the Raptor Resource Project to propagate and release peregrine falcons. He was the first person to successfully breed peregrine falcons in Minnesota. MF-1, one of the first falcons he produced and released, became the first returned falcon to breed in the mid-continent following the species' extirpation in the mid-1960's. It took an incredible amount of work to keep the peregrine falcon from joining the long list of species that will be mourned on the remembrance day for lost species. I am thankful that the peregrine falcon is still with us. Where we have a will, we have a way.

Falcon MF-1. Produced by Bob, she was the first falcon to return and breed in the wild mid-continent. 

I am thankful to have met Bob. He responded to an ad my little writing business was running back in 1994. I began by writing grants, but very quickly moved into field work. Did I want to attend a banding and take pictures? Yes! Did I want to hold falcons? Yes! Did I want to rappel? Yes yes yes! The writer William Least Heat Moon said in the Wonsevu chapter of the book PrairyErth that "I'm not sure what to make of it, but I think a dream can set you on another path." Bob's dream of restoring the peregrine falcon set many people's lives on another path.

Most of the power plant people originally involved in our utility-peregrine program have retired, but a new generation of men and women have replaced them in this unique marriage of industry and conservation. The peregrine would not be where it is today without their help and whole-hearted involvement in the program. Together we've put up nest boxes and internet cameras, cared for falcons, eagles, and kestrels, and looked at ways to make generation and distribution safer for our birds. I am thankful to have worked with the fine men and women employed at America's power plants. The utility-peregrine program is an example of the ways in which humans can support wildlife even in the unlikeliest of areas. You guys are awesome...and great fun, too!

Banding at Xcel's Allen S. King plant in 2010

Bob was also working on his cliff release project. Back in 1994, he began to believe that nest-site imprinting was preventing the crossover of peregrines from power plants to cliffs. The Iowa DNR was very interested in working with Bob, so he picked up lock, stock, and barrel to move down to Bluffton, Iowa in 1996. He did a successful pilot release on the Upper Iowa river in 1997 and released a total of 19 falcons from Hanging Rock at Effigy Mounds National Monument in 1998 and 1999. The Upper Iowa hackbox can still be seen from the river, although the Effigy Mounds hackboxes are long gone. In 2000, our cliff-released falcons became the first falcons to return to the cliffs of the Mississippi. I remember going to see them quite well, since I was very pregnant with my last son. I did a lot of crazy things for and with Bob, but the only time I remember him being really worried about me was just after I huffed and puffed my way up the back of Queen's Bluff. Pat Schlarbaum's story about peregrine recovery includes information about our cliff releases. It can be read here: http://www.gladysblackeagle.org/project-ideas/longwings-return. I am thankful to have played a small piece in this story, and very grateful to the men and women of the Iowa DNR who supported Bob's work.

Falcons raised for cliff release, 1997

In 2006 and 2007, Bob was working with Neil Rettig on the movie American Bald Eagle. After the two wrapped up, Bob said "Wouldn't it be fun to put this nest on the internet?" We made Bob's dream a reality in 2009, when the Decorah Eagle Cam uploaded an image to Xcel Energy's website every two minutes. In 2010, Luther College hosted a live feed. In 2011, we moved to Ustream and the Decorah eagles became a worldwide sensation. While we celebrated the eagles, Bob also mourned the loss of his dear friend and fellow falconer Rob MacIntyre, the 'mad scientist' who was featured so prominently in the movie RaptorForce. Rob did a lot of the work on our earlier cam systems, and his death was a real blow both personally and professionally. I am thankful to have known him and his wonderful wife Jan. They brightened every room they entered.

Rob and Bob

While Bob never lost his drive to recover birds of prey, he suddenly had a new focus. He was deeply engaged in using our bird cams to reach learners and provide a palliative window to the outside for ill, injured, and bedridden people. Online education became a major focus, but cameras still needed to be researched and purchased, and HD was increasingly looking like the next step. Enter John Howe! John began working with Bob to research cameras and camera technologies, including solar/wireless technologies (Rob installed our first solar/wireless system back in 2003) and HD. The longer Bob worked with John, the more he was impressed. Shortly before Bob's death, he let us all know that John was to follow him as Director of the Raptor Resource Project.

John and Bob

This brings us up to the present. In the three years since Bob's death, John has worked diligently to keep up with camera and streaming technology, deploy cameras, expand our online educational offerings, honor Bob's legacy, and secure funding (an organization doesn't run very long without money). He has more than proven himself as a director and a leader. I am thankful for John Howe and only wish that Bob was here to see the positive change that John has brought to the Raptor Resource Project.

So where do we go from here? We are sustained by our mission: to preserve and strengthen raptor populations, expand participation in raptor preservation, and help foster the next generation of preservationists. We follow our vision: to deepen the connection between people and the natural world, bringing benefits to both.

• Education: We served 1,270 educators through our educational video stream and chat in 2018. We also added a kestrel live stream in partnership with Neil Rettig Productions and Cornell University and completed the second fall of our research and educational banding station in partnership with Luther College. Teachers Deb Ripple and Lori Carnes have started to produce curriculum for our educational program and teachers are also sharing ideas on a platform started by Lori. 
• Preserving and Strengthening Raptor Populations: Despite the rain and lower hatching success this year, we banded 72 falcons in 2018. We will continue to monitor our nests, band falcons, consult on nestboxes and habitat for a variety of species, provide input on conservation issues, and work with federal and state wildlife agencies to benefit of birds of prey. We are also looking at ways to strengthen existing partnerships and build new ones. How can we connect our passionate followers with organizations looking for volunteers? How can we work closer with our utility and industry partners on providing or improving habitat for the many birds that nest on or use utility land and water in other ways? How can we advocate for birds of prey? We have done a lot, but we can do more. We stand on the shoulders of giants!
• Fostering the Next Generation of Preservationists: We've begun an educational endowment in Bob's honor. Please follow this link to learn more and to donate! We hope to fund our first students next fall.
• Connecting People with the Natural World: John upped the ante on our cameras! We are currently providing top-notch, HD, ads-free streams through Explore, and streams plus live chat at our website. John's current camera installations are also letting us take a look at life outside our nests - an important part of understanding and caring for the eagles and falcons we watch. A challenge for me: how do we develop quantifiable data from the thousands of hours of footage and anecdotes we've collected? Our knowledge has already changed since we first began watching the eagles (remember eagles are always monogamous?), but there is so much more to learn! 

So what else am I thankful for?

• I am thankful for our amazing volunteers. In addition to your incredible work, my life is better for having known you. I've said it before and I'll say it again...your work makes us the best site on the web!
• I am thankful for fans of the Decorah eagles and our other birds. Please, keep emailing and mailing your stories and art. You have deepened our lives an immeasurable amount.
• I am thankful to our Board for providing direction and guidance. 
• I am thankful for an unexpected and unlooked for gift: the honor to be part of the Raptor Resource Project's work. My 1994 self - I was 28 years old! - had no way of knowing what saying 'Yes' to Bob's first request would lead to. Bob, we will remember and celebrate you until we join you.

Thank you, everyone. I'm going to close with a link to a favorite blog I did on Bob back in 2012: Watching Bald Eagles. In re-reading it, I affirmed my own goal to help our eagles' futures stretch as long as their past. May Mom and Dad's progeny survive into a beautiful future, and may falcon MF-1 have thousands more descendants! Long may they all fly!

The Raptor Resource Project wishes you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving!