Sylvie Paillard
[email protected]
An eagle expert and wildlife biologist with close ties to the Brackendale Winter Eagle Festival & Count ruffled some feathers this week when a Vancouver Sun article quoted him as saying that Vancouver was the "eagle capital of the world."
Local eagle festival founder Thor Froslev has trademarked the motto to apply solely to Brackendale, and as an annual Eagle Festival guest speaker, it was felt Hancock should be aware of that fact. Hancock was quoted in an article regarding a project to accumulate reports of bald eagles living in Greater Vancouver undertaken by the Hancock Wildlife Research Centre in Surrey.
"I've got 154 pairs nesting in greater Vancouver. It's unbelievable," said Hancock. "That's more eagles nesting in Greater Vancouver than are in most states of the union. You can probably take 10 states and not come up with that many."
Hancock said he clarified his comments during a visit with Froslev last Saturday (April 1).
"I'm just calling Vancouver 'the urban eagle capital of the world', which it is. He's jealously guarding the eagle capital," Hancock laughed.
Councilor Patricia Heintzman brought up the issue during the Tuesday (April 4) council meeting. Mayor Ian Sutherland said he had already put in a call to the newspaper to correct the error, reminding editors at the Sun that Brackendale holds that title.
Hancock said he doesn't think that the quote will draw attention away from Squamish. In fact all the attention being paid to the province's eagles can be complementary to Squamish's promotions.
"I'm out promoting the Brackendale Eagle Festival all the time, it's on my website. We've got a Fraser Valley bald eagle festival another big one at Hanes, and a new one now at Campbell River, we had it this year for the first time. But it's not a wintering group of birds. It's about nesting birds, when they go in the nesting territory in February," said Hancock. "There's lots of things happening and it's not competitively, it's cooperatively."
Hancock's latest project has garnered worldwide attention to his website, hancockhouse.com, which received two million hits within five days last week. The item drawing so much attention is the world's first online live video stream of a pair of nesting eagles. The couple is at the top of a 100-foot tree on Hornby Island, and is days away from seeing their two eggs hatch. A camera was installed in the tree two years ago while the raptors were away and a Vancouver web hoster volunteered to broadcast the live feed last week at a cost of $2,000 to $3,000 a day. Once word got out, millions began checking out the site. And it will only get bigger, said Hancock. By the time the eggs are due to hatch on April 25th, Hancock anticipates 10 million viewers. And in the forums section of the website, visitors can learn about the Brackendale Winter Eagle Festival & Count.
