The American bald eagle, revered and reviled over more than two centuries, today will be officially declared safe from extinction in the lower 48 states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which led a four-decade effort to resuscitate the national bird, is taking it off the Endangered Species list.
The majestic raptor had declined from half a million nesting pairs at the time of European settlement to 417 in 1963. By last year, it had rebounded to 9,789 pairs, and an estimated 11,040 today. In California, where bald eagles have been reintroduced to the Channel Islands and elsewhere, more than 200 pairs are breeding.
"It is an astounding recovery," said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based advocacy group. "It attests to a dramatic change in the American environmental ethic."
Nonetheless, it has been a roller-coaster flight. In 1782, the Continental Congress made the bald eagle the national emblem, with its image on the Great Seal of the United States, clutching arrows and an olive branch.
But as the U.S. population grew, ranchers and farmers came to view bald eagles as nuisance predators, despite the fact that the bird is mostly a fish-eater. They were routinely shot and driven from their nesting grounds by logging, farming and homebuilding. By the 1950s, the spread of the pesticide DDT, which thins the eagle's eggshells, had led to a catastrophic decline.
The comeback began with a 1972 ban on DDT and stringent protections under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Since then, tens of millions of dollars have been spent on eagle recovery efforts by federal, state, and nonprofit groups. In 1995, the bald eagle was reclassified from "endangered" to the less-severe "threatened" status.
Alaska's bald eagles, which number 25,000, are not endangered. Hawaii has none.
"It wasn't just money," said David Garcelon, president of the Arcata, Calif.-based Institute for Wildlife Studies. "People put huge amounts of effort into it. It would have been pretty sad to see our national symbol blink out."
Such an effort took place on the Channel Islands, where scientists began to reintroduce bald eagles in 1980. But the birds were unable to reproduce after consuming fish contaminated by DDT, which had been discharged off the Palos Verdes Peninsula by Montrose Chemical Co. in the 1950s and '60s. Their eggshells were so thin that nesting birds would crush them.
