An adult bald eagle protests as research Jack Holt enters a nest to band young and take measurements and blood samples. (credit: Ron Austing).
I once had a bald eagle die in my arms. Let me tell you, that was a sad day indeed. I don’t know if you’ve held such a magnificent creature, but it happened like this.
Back in the spring of 1978, we received a call at the Cincinnati Zoo from a harried homeowner who said she had “a big hawk” in her backyard and the police were on their way over to shoot it. She said it was “a highly unusual bird unlike anything she’d seen before.” I doubted that this was true, but the woman sounded so concerned about the bird that I caved in and said I would come by on my way home since it was the end of the day and she lived up near my house. I even more seriously doubted that it was a big hawk or a rare bird at all. Most of the time by the time you arrive at someone’s house, the fierce creature they were describing ends up being a pigeon.
Nonetheless, to my complete surprise, sure enough, what she had was an immature bald eagle in her backyard. Her small dog was barking at it, and even from a distance I could tell it was in bad shape. She mistook it for a hawk because it was a first-year bird with all-brown feathers—bald eagles don’t get their white head and tail feathers until at least their fourth year as a sign of maturity and that they are ready to mate.
The vast majority of birds of prey that are hatched each spring do not survive their first year. It is not easy being on the top of the food chain, and clearly this bird was starving. She wasn’t even fighting that hard when I grabbed her, which any bird of prey will naturally do if you approach that closely. She still was a presence, though. And when I picked up this ailing bird, she filled my arms with feathers and wings and spirit. I took her to a veterinarian who was willing to help with wild animals. Unfortunately, the vet’s attempts to hydrate the bird through an IV failed, and she soon died in my arms. And all this was doubly sad because bald eagles were so very endangered at the time.
When I moved to Ohio in 1977, there were zero successful nests in the entire state, although four pairs of the raptors still lived on the shores of Lake Erie. Amazingly, since that sad day when I held the dying bird of prey, the bald eagle has made such a dramatic comeback that it has been taken off the Endangered Species List in much of its range. In the spring of 2005, the Ohio Division of Wildlife monitored 151 successful nests—each with a pair of adult eagles and at least one eaglet who fledged from the nest to establish a territory elsewhere. And as the old saying goes, “If conservation can work in Ohio, it can work anywhere!”
As the American national symbol, the bald eagle was among the very first species to be given protection under our law. In 1900, the Lacey Act was passed, making it illegal to “take,” meaning kill, or possess bald eagles or other designated species. Then in 1940, the Bald Eagle Protection Act was passed, providing farther-reaching protections. However, toward the end of World War II, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) became a common agricultural insecticide, and was also used throughout coastal areas and wetlands to control mosquitoes. As a direct result, the bald eagle’s decline continued until DDT was finally banned from use in the United States at the end of 1972.
Eventually, the eagle was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act on February 14, 1978. There’s no doubt that its inspiring comeback is due to both the ban on DDT in North America and important legislation like the Endangered Species Act, the Wetlands Protection Acts, and the Clean Water Act.
But this success was clearly in doubt a generation ago when the American conservation movement took shape. Pete Dunne is the founder and director of the Cape May Bird Observatory in southern New Jersey, a perch from which he has spent thirty years living among, teaching about, and writing on the status of birds in North America. His book Featherquest chronicles the decline of many species in much of their former range, principally due to habitat fragmentation.
“I think on the whole, things are very, very good for birds of prey,” Pete said to me during one of our conversations. “There’s a part of me that really misses those days when a bald eagle would literally stop traffic,” he said. “Today, largely due to recovery efforts, as well as the efforts of the eagles themselves, I can pass five, six, or even eight bald eagles on my way to work in the morning.”
To naturalists who have spent nearly half a century afield, this recovery is still surprising. As Pete recounted, “Thirty years ago, you would spend an entire weekend trying to catch a glimpse of a bald eagle. Sometimes people today are jaded by the wealth of birds. They don’t realize how dire it was in the 1970s.” Because of the rampant use of DDT, there was a time when biologists believed it was possible that raptor populations could disappear from the planet. “And I will admit that I will never quite get over that,” Pete said. “Every time I see a bald eagle there’s a little part of me that just goes Yeah! because I remember.” In the late 1970s, Pete could count six eagles in an entire year at Cape May. Today he can sometimes see six in a single binocular view soaring above the hawk-watch platform at the state park.
The nationwide comeback of the bald eagle is, indeed, mind boggling. In 1963, there were but 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the lower forty-eight states, but beginning in the 1970s the numbers began to rise steadily; in 2007 there were more than eighty-five hundred successful nests. As a result, the eagle has been down-listed from endangered to threatened throughout the United States. However, it’s important to remember that the comeback of the bald eagles took a long time, and that they were the last raptor to recover. Even now, the species still remains highly protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Part of what makes bald eagles so significant is that they are a signature bird. “They are a reflection of our environment and its health as a whole,” said Pete. “Not just in the biological sense, but in an emotional sense as well. The bald eagle is the emblematic bird of American and as such Americans are all wedded or bonded to this bird. And the fact that the bird has recovered should make everyone, from all interests and walks of life, raise their shoulders up just a little bit and say, ‘Look, we can do this. We can live in this world and live in balance with other creatures.’”
As for me, I will never forget the first eagle I ever held. She didn’t survive, but when I look up into the Ohio skies, I am grateful that her cousins are back, and back for good.
