When I told friends and family that it was a total coincidence that my trip plans were taking me to the site of the rarest raptor in North America, understandably, no one believed me. In September 2024, I departed my home in tropical Costa Rica to head to the rocky outports of Newfoundland’s Bonavista peninsula and was fortunate enough to spot Stella, the lone Steller’s Sea-Eagle in North America. This is the story of a remarkable journey – hers.
A Massive Eagle Makes a Massive Journey
Steller’s Sea-Eagles (Haliaeetus pelagicus) are coastal northeastern Asia’s larger version of a Bald Eagle. Weighing up to 10 kg (22 pounds), it is the heaviest Eagle in the world, dwarfing the Bald Eagle which tops out at 6.3 kg (13.8 pounds). It is an imposing figure with a wingspan that can reach up to 2.5 meters (over 8 feet). Like most raptors, the females are larger; in the case of Steller’s Sea-Eagle, they are up to 20% larger and 80% heavier than males.
Steller’s Sea-Eagle is one of four Eagles in the genus Haliaeetus, along with the Bald Eagle (H. leucocephalus) of North America, the White-tailed Eagle (H. albicilla), and the endangered Pallas’s Fish-Eagle (H. leucoryphus) both from Asia. The entire population of 3,500 to 4,500 mature Steller’s Sea-Eagles, except for one individual, are found among the coastal regions of northern Japan and far eastern Siberia, as well as the Korean Peninsula.
So how did this massive eastern Asian raptor end up at the extreme eastern end of North America? It was a long trip. If a Steller’s Sea-Eagle would show up anywhere in the ABA area, Alaska would be by far the most likely location. A few have over the years, including a possible Bald Eagle x Steller’s Sea-Eagle hybrid. That’s also where this individual first showed up. On August 30, 2020 it was first spotted at mile marker 43 of the Denali Highway by birder Josh Parks, much farther inland than previous sightings in Alaska. The few vagrant sightings have normally been coastal, which is their typical habitat. Seven months later it was photographed again in southern Texas, of all places. After another one-and-done sighting, it showed up in June, 2021 in the Canadian maritimes. Photos of the wing pattern allowed confirming it was the same individual. Finally, it bounced around between Massachusetts, Maine, and Nova Scotia for a few months.
A New Home
A vagrant looking for a home, she finally seemed to mostly settle in the Bonavista – Trinity Bay region of Newfoundland, Canada. My ancestors made a similar decision some 200 years ago. The Steller’s Sea-Eagle is a fish specialist and the waters around Newfoundland, known as the Grand Banks, have historically been some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. That led the family of my paternal grandmother, the Princes, to immigrate from England and eventually set up the small fishing outport of Princeton on the Bonavista Peninsula in 1840.
It had been two decades since I last visited my family on “The Rock” as Newfoundlanders affectionately call their island home. The complications of getting a visa for my Costa Rican wife, along with the high cost of flights between the two locations, meant it was on my list of places I wanted to visit (a very long list) but not on the horizon for an imminent visit. Things got a little easier when, earlier in 2024, Canada loosened restrictions on Costa Rican tourism, allowing Costa Ricans who held a valid US travel visa to visit with only a visa waiver. Then, one day in August 2024, on a whim, I was feeling an itch to travel and got the idea to look at flights to Newfoundland.
Much to my surprise, I found incredibly cheap flights for about ten days in the future. After a phone call to my great aunt and uncle and my wife coming home to find me in the doorway excitedly explaining what I’d found and supportively looking at me and wondering if I finally had gone crazy, I had us booked on flights from one saintly city, San José, to another, St. John’s. Tickets in hand, I started looking into what birds I was likely to see in mid-September and remembered the Steller’s Sea-Eagle.
A Plan Comes Together
With my historic connection to the island and desire to visit one day, I follow the Instagram of Jared Clarke, aka BirdTheRock, a fantastic ambassador for Newfoundland Birding. I saw his reports of this super bird shortly before my parents were planning a visit up to Newfoundland to bury my grandmother’s ashes in the summer of 2023. My father is a non-birder photographer but liked the idea of seeing something so rare. Jared helped me get him in contact with the people going out to see Stella (as they’d taken to calling her) via a whale-watching tour.
There were two tour operators going out to see her – Trinity Eco Tours and Sea of Whales Adventures. In the small, interconnected world of rural Newfoundland, we found out that Sea of Whales is owned and operated by a second cousin – Kris Prince. Kris’ grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers. I was both jealous and happy that my dad got to see this fantastic raptor before I did.
She settled along the coast of Trinity Bay after over a year of wandering North America. The novelty of the sighting, and thus posts on social media, died down, and it drifted out of my thoughts. Only after I booked the flights (I swear!) I turned to eBird and found out that Stella was still being periodically seen around Trinity Bay. Trinity is a three-hour drive from St. John’s, but I already wanted to go out to the family homestead in Princeton, only twenty minutes from Trinity Bay, and stay in the house my great-grandfather built and that my grandmother grew up in. It has now been renovated and converted into a charming Airbnb by another cousin.
I called up Sea of Whales and explained I was a distant cousin living in the more distant tropics but who was planning to come up in a couple of weeks. We were excited to meet up, but they had bad news. They’re primarily a whale-watching outfit and they go out from two ports – Trinity (where Stella was) and Princeton (where my grandmother was from). A combination of bad wind and the waters out of Trinity being in their words “a desert of mammal activity” in those days meant they had stopped going out of Trinity. In other words, the chances of even going to the right spot, let alone seeing her, were bleak.
Birding the Rock
I refocused on enjoying what birding I could. We visited the largest Atlantic Puffin colony in North America at Witless Island and we went down to Cape St. Mary’s to one of the largest seabird colonies in North America with an estimated 23,000 Northern Gannets. Had this been a well-planned birding trip, I would have gone in the spring when half a million puffins would be at Witless (instead of the few hundred we saw) and other exciting species could be seen at Cape St. Mary’s.
Still, the birding was good. I picked up several ABA rarities like Pink-footed Goose, Tufted Duck, and Eurasian Wigeon. On our drive home from Cape St. Mary’s my wife spotted a Gyrfalcon perched on a telephone pole. I was so fixed on identifying it (aided by having seen two in captivity that morning at Salmonier Nature Park) and my camera so packed away that I wasn’t able to get a shot of it. I also didn’t realize just how rare it was for this time of year, being one of a handful of summer reports of the species for Newfoundland. I took heart that at least I’d seen one rare raptor on the trip.
The next day, two days before we were supposed to go out to Princeton, I called up my cousin at Sea of Whales again. He had good news. The wind had shifted and they would be almost certainly going out of Trinity on Sunday, one of our two potential days to go out. We ended up having one of the only days with the right weather in several weeks to go out for the Sea-Eagle. We left St. John’s around 4 am, dodging moose on the Trans-Canada, and arrived at Trinity bright and early and with perfect weather.
We Go to Sea to See an Eagle
I was cautiously optimistic as we headed out, constantly scanning the cliffs. As we went from bay to bay, flying along with the dual outboards opened up, we were coming up blank. Plenty of Bald Eagles, but not a hint of Stella. After two hours we saw a promising silhouette on a rocky outcrop at Cat Cove, one of the bays she’s most been spotted in. We headed directly for it, and as we got closer, my hopes were dashed by the bright white head – another Bald Eagle. We were within a few hundred yards of a fishing trawler, so Kris hailed them to see if they’d seen any whales or “the Eagle”. We were near the end of the three-hour tour and the knot in my stomach that we’d gotten so close but missed it was getting ever tighter. Their response that they’d not seen anything was disheartening.
And just in that moment of despair, a shadow appeared. A massive shadow. My wife and I both turned and flying right off the stern of the boat about ten meters above us was Stella! My camera was firing as many images as it could until the buffer filled up while I was wildly whooping and hollering as I tracked her circling us with my camera. Elation. The pièce de résistance of a successful trip on our second to last day.
She started flying north along with a Bald Eagle and we took off in pursuit. According to Kris the boat reached around 40 mph (65 kph) and despite that, we were still having trouble keeping up with her. As she flew over the cliffs we lost sight of her. We circled in Spaniard’s Cove but without success started our way back up toward where we had initially spotted her. Halfway there my eagle-eyed wife, who always manages to spot animals long before anyone else does said she spotted it far up on the cliffs in some vegetation. It took Kris and I scanning with binoculars a good minute to find what she spotted while we were moving along at speed. We were passing around our binoculars to the other passengers and some of them still couldn’t spot her for several minutes.
Farewell, Goodbye, See You Again?
After a quarter hour with Stella, we saw our first cetaceans of the day – a pack of around 50 Atlantic White-sided Dolphins (Lagenorhynchus acutus) so we bade farewell and left Stella perched majestically on the rocky cliffs. I was basking in the glory of this mega-lifer, my 1,161st bird species worldwide, and wondering how many more North American birders would get the chance to see her. Earlier in 2024, she was seen organizing sticks in a Bald Eagle nest nearby and while nothing came of it this year, hybridization with a Bald Eagle remains a possibility.
How settled she is in the Trinity Bay area remains to be seen. It’s the spot she’s spent the most time in, but a few days after we spotted her the final reports of the year trickled in. Then, as I was finalizing this article in December 2024, she started showing up in a new spot a bit further north. The sightings made the national news on CBC and she seems to be hanging around Terra Nova National Park a bit farther north of Trinity and Bonavista bays.
So little is known about the movements of most species of raptors, including Steller’s Sea-Eagles, that it’s impossible to predict what she will do next. This gap in our knowledge also makes protecting these species, many like Steller’s Sea-Eagle which is classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN, a challenge. Crowd-sourced, citizen science observations like those I and many others have uploaded to eBird are important pieces of the puzzle. Yet rigorous research on bird movements and habitat selection, like that being done on other raptor species by the Wild Bird Research Group, remains vital for protecting the future of these magnificent raptors. As Stella continues to patrol the shores of Newfoundland, her presence is a reminder that there is still much to learn about the far-reaching movements of these impressive birds.
This is the first article in a series of Wild Bird Research Collaborators articles sharing their experiences in the field with wild birds.
About the author: Tyler Wenzel is the Digital Media Coordinator for the Wild Bird Research Group. He is a contributing author to Birds of the World and has been involved with the production of several books on neotropical wildlife. Except where indicated all photos are copyrighted by Tyler.
