O, say can you see that huge bird in the sky? Today, it’s not only possible but likely that the UFO you spy is a bald eagle. Yet not so long ago, few might have believed you.
Bruce Behler’s Birdlife of the Adirondack Park, published by the Adirondack Mountain Club in 1978, which is about the time I started paying close attention to birds in the region, gives a bleak picture of the bald eagle’s status. “Breeding,” he writes, “very rare; probably no successful nests since 1971; possibly extirpated.” If you’re unfamiliar with the lingo of scarcity, “extirpated” means locally extinct.
My, how things have changed! A few days ago, driving a back road in the southern Adirondacks near Northville, I came upon a brawl over a deer carcass. Four bald eagles, including the handsome adult shown above, were squabbling over a gaping hide and rib cage with five or six ravens. (The ravens made such a racket as they fought and flew that in the midst of the commotion, I failed to make an exact count.) Two of the eagles I saw were black-and-white adults. Two were juveniles, brown mottled with white. Here’s a look at one of the juveniles as it flapped noisily directly over my head.
To move from the nonexistence of the 1970s to the bald eagle bounty we enjoy in the Adirondacks today, the birds needed help. They got it from taxpayers and a New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) program aimed at bringing back extirpated species (ones gone from NY but still surviving elsewhere) to their historic homes. The pesticide DDT is widely believed to have been the chief agent of the bird’s demise. It caused female eagles to lay eggs with shells so thin that when the mothers sat on them, they broke. Thanks in part to biologist Rachel Carson’s sounding the alarm and the environmental movement spurred on by her book, Silent Spring, DDT was banned. Years passed. The pesticide and its metabolites lingered, and still New York had no eagles.
Enter DEC’s Endangered Species Unit, led at the time by Peter Nye. Pete built a team and made arrangements to take hatchling eagles from Alaska, where the species remained abundant, and release them at hacking towers in wild, watery places in New York. The young birds were fed with the aid of puppets so that when they looked up at their benefactors, they saw reasonable facsimiles of adult eagles rather than humans. Young raptors and many other birds go through a process called imprinting. Their self-image seems to derive from the nursery maid who feeds them. If that nursery maid is an eagle or looks like an eagle, the young bird grows up to seek romance with fellow eagles. If it looks up and sees a friendly human feeding it, all may be well for several years. Then, when the eagle develops a white head and white tail and is ready to seek its first mate, it will go in search of a human. Of course, that’s a potentially dangerous situation, and it’s not a good formula for making baby eagles.
To move things along, in short, the program worked. By 1989, when the operations shut down, 198 young eagles, the majority Alaskan, had been set free in New York. Not all survived, but enough did to establish a breeding population. That population has been expanding and thrilling wildlife lovers ever since.
