Birds that wander out of their home ranges can be an unexpected source of revenue. Stella, a Steller’s sea eagle, recently turned up in Maine and Massachusetts, drawing tourists who spent nearly US $500,000.
Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
It was a frigid January morning when Liz Pusch, a biologist and avid birder, finally got to see Stella, the Steller’s sea eagle. Pusch had traveled all the way from Stone Mountain, Georgia, for her once-in-a-lifetime chance to glimpse the bird, and as she pulled over by the side of the road near Boothbay, Maine, where Stella had been sighted, she found she was one in a crowd. “There were at least 150 people,” says Pusch. “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Stella, who bears a bright-tangerine beak, striking white shoulders, and a wingspan the width of a king-sized bed, is a minor avian celebrity. The raptor is not only impressively large, it is rare and terribly lost. Steller’s sea eagles typically live around the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea, in China, Korea, Japan, and eastern Russia, where the declining population numbers 4,000-odd birds. Stella—whose sex is still unknown—was first spotted in Alaska in August 2020 before making its way to Texas in March 2021 and to eastern Canada later that year. Media caught wind of the surprising journey, and Facebook groups and a Twitter account popped up to track Stella sightings. By December 2021, the sea eagle had settled in Massachusetts and Maine, about 11,000 kilometers from home, and Pusch decided to make the trip to see the bird. In April 2022, several months after Pusch’s visit, Stella moved north to Nova Scotia and was most recently seen in Newfoundland.
Birds wandering out of their home range is a fairly common occurrence. Hurricanes and other extreme weather events may blow some birds off course, while other individuals could simply be born with a wonky GPS. Alternatively, some scientists think vagrant birds like Stella could be the pioneers of a species exploring new habitats. Regardless of why birds stray, vagrants can be a surprising source of revenue for local economies as birders flock for their chance to add an exclusive avian to their lifetime lists of birds. In research that is not yet published, Brent Pease, an ecologist at Southern Illinois University,…
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