Wild Things: Bald eagles provide some cheerful news

An adult bald eagle. ED KANZE PHOTO

By ED KANZE

Bad news bombard our eyes and ears these days, and as much as people of goodwill might want to turn away, we need to pay attention. All the same, it’s healthy to take a break from Armageddon-is-just-around-the-corner fare and wallow in a bit of good news now and again. So let’s linger for a few hundred words in the comeback in Northeastern North America of the bald eagle.

When I started actively birdwatching in the late 1970s, bald eagles in my home county of Westchester were hard to come by. No, it was worse than that. They were nonexistent, except for the rare and very occasional migrant drifting overhead. This was not always so. On the Hudson River, for example, at Croton Point, a wintering colony of these super-sized raptors had flourished in living memory, and the birds had likely been roosting and feeding there during the cold months for centuries and perhaps for millennia. In the late 19th century, bald eagles nested along the Hudson near Ossining. Sadly, by the time I started looking for them, they were gone.

In the 1985 edition of ornithologist John Bull’s “Birds of New York,” the bald eagle was listed as “rare at any time and probably no longer breeding.” 

Why the population crash? Bull, who I once had the pleasure of meeting when he and his wife, Edith, pulled into my driveway at the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, cited not only the usual culprit, the pesticide DDT, but also “shooting, trapping, and egging” as well as the destruction of nest trees and an increase in the use of pesticides in general. The loss of this majestic bird, our national symbol, was tragic. 

The foundations for the recovery of the bald eagle are familiar, I suspect, to most of us. DDT, which caused female bald eagles to lay thin-shelled eggs that collapsed under the weight of incubating adults, was banned. And the bald eagle was given federal protection, which slowed the “shooting, trapping, and egging” and nest-tree felling.

But bringing the bald eagle back and making it a major presence in the Northeast once more required more. It needed you (if you pay taxes in New York), and a great deal of hard work was called for, too. Labor and expertise were supplied by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, and specifically by its Endangered Species Unit led by Peter Nye.

Pete and his team flew to Alaska, and with the permission of wildlife authorities there, climbed high in trees to see if parent eagles (there were, and are, tens of thousands of them in Alaska) could spare a chick. As Pete explained to me once, bald eagles commonly produce two chicks per nest, but sometimes there is a third. Parent eagles usually succeed in raising two offspring to the point where they fly and feed on their own, but three are problematic. New York’s eagle restoration team had permission to take a chick from three-chick nests. 

For the decade or so the restoration effort lasted, chicks were flown back to New York and set up in faux eagle nests in faux trees called “hacking towers.” It was critical that the eagle chicks not see humans feeding them, lest they form self-images that resemble you or me. And so they were fed by technicians the eagles couldn’t see, technicians who wore eagle puppets over their hands.  

Did it work? Were your tax dollars, and mine, well spent? Let the bald eagle answer the question. 

Have a look around.

At Croton Point, eagles again gather in winter to feed, rest, and keep each other company. In spring and summer, on big lakes and rivers throughout the state, bald eagles nest in the 2020s. Seeing one fly overhead, the enormous wings in large females spanning more than 7 feet, is all I need to remind me that we can get along with each other when we put our minds to it; we can pool our resources, and we can mix up-to-date science with old-fashioned manual labor and accomplish great things.