First Description of a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) Attempting Depredation on an Adult Whooping Crane (Grus americana) of the Aransas-Wood Buffalo Population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twice annually, the last remaining wild and self-sustaining migratory population of Whooping Cranes (Grus americana) migrates through central Nebraska on its approximately 3900-km journey between Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast of Texas and Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada. On 27 March 2018, a juvenile Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) was observed attacking a Whooping Crane on the Loup River near Rockville, Nebraska. The encounter, documented by a private landowner, was forwarded to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the decades-long citizen-science effort undertaken to track and record public sightings of Whooping Cranes during migration. Crane species have few avian predators, and observations of depredations upon these crane species are rare. The Whooping Crane fended off the Bald Eagle, utilizing a “jump-rake” defense; neither species appeared harmed by the clearly aggressive interaction. The episode was reflective of recent observations of Bald Eagles depredating Sandhill Cranes on the Platte River during the spring migration. To our knowledge, this is the first description in scientific literature of a Bald Eagle attacking a Whooping Crane from the Aransas-Wood Buffalo population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".