EAGLE RESCUE WINGS IT WITH LESS MONEY.

Byline: LEE PETERSON Staff Writer

As another bald eagle nesting season approaches on Catalina Island, Peter Sharpe is once again ready to mid-wife as many eaglets as he can.

But he and his group will be doing it on a very tight budget, facing the second season in a row without a main source of funding for the breeding program.

``We're scraping by,'' Sharpe said. ``We're doing our own fundraising and just cut way, way back.''

The Institute for Wildlife Studies has turned to fundraising and donations to try to replace government dollars that have been cut off. It also has scaled back on personnel: In addition to wildlife biologist Sharpe, there is now just one research assistant.

Previously, the institute had received funds from the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program, which oversees money from a lawsuit settlement over DDT pesticide ocean dumping off the Palos Verdes Peninsula -- the same dumping that works its way up the food chain to seafood-loving bald eagles, and thins and weakens their eggs.

But in 2005, trustees for the project decided the funds would be better used on wildlife regeneration projects elsewhere in the Channel Islands.

Now, in about a month, four pairs and one threesome of nesting bald eagles on Catalina should start laying their eggs, Sharpe said.

Sharpe will go in -- dangling from a helicopter in some cases -- and retrieve the eggs, swapping in fake ones for the eagles to sit on in four of the nests.

This year, for the first time, he will let one nest keep its own egg. The eggs from the others will be incubated on the island until they hatch about a month later.

Then, along with other freshly hatched chicks from the San Francisco Zoo, Sharpe will go back with the live chicks and leave them, hopefully two per nest, for the parents to raise.

The project to re-establish the native bald eagle population on Catalina started with the release of juvenile bald eagles nearly three decades ago.

Eventually, as breeding pairs formed, biologists began fostering in eaglets hatched at the San Francisco Zoo.

Sharpe said his program had been receiving about $200,000 a year from the Montrose Settlements panel, which still pays for some monitoring at Catalina.

The Montrose program allocated about $27,000 last year to Catalina and this year has earmarked $30,000, he said.

Sharpe's Institute for Wildlife Studies also has been funded to monitor Santa Cruz Island to the north, where two bald eagle pairs -- three of the four birds are originally from Catalina -- successfully laid and hatched eggs without human help. They were the first eagles hatched there in more than 50 years.

For now, evaluation and efforts to re-establish bald eagles on the northern Channel Islands will continue for several years, said Milena Viljoen, public information officer for the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program.

But there is no immediate plan to restore full funding to the Catalina Island project.

lee.peterson(at)dailybreeze.com

[phone]