Reporting from Washington — The crraaaack! crraaaack! was so loud that James Tolbert looked out his town house window to investigate, and that's when he saw it -- a snowy white head with yellow eyes soaring into the woods across the street, a tree branch the size of a baseball bat locked in its beak.
The National Park Service soon confirmed what this blighted community 1.5 miles from the Capitol could scarcely believe: A pair of American bald eagles had built a nest in the nation's capital for the first time since Harry S. Truman was president.
That was the winter of 2001 and ever since, the nest known only as "DC-07-01" has been one of Washington's best kept secrets, protected by park rangers the way the National Archives guards the Constitution, preserved and seldom seen.
Almost no one outside the Congress Heights neighborhood knew the birds were there. They are not listed on any maps. And that's the way it might have stayed if the Department of Homeland Security, the agency created to keep America safe after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, had not decided to build its mega-headquarters near the woods where the eagles nest.
The government says a centralized control center would streamline its response to a national emergency by bringing thousands of federal workers under one roof, with a new access road to handle most of the traffic.
But the road would run through 200 acres of protected wildlife habitat, wiping out a dozen acres of trees. That, some fear, could drive off the only pair of eagles intrepid enough to call Washington home. "They used to be here, they weren't here for many years and now they're back. It makes me feel better knowing something is coming back," Stephen Syphax, a National Park Service ranger, said one morning as he walked through the woods near the eagles' nest.
Every January for eight years, the eagles have returned to their gargantuan homestead to spend six months raising their chicks near the top of an 80-foot red oak. At 4 feet deep and nearly as wide, the nest is big enough for a man to stand in. On winter days without the cover of leaves, it looks like a brown Volkswagen Bug dropped from the heavens and landed upside down in a tree.
There are images of America's fabled raptor all over Washington, carved in stone and sculpted in bronze. But the real thing had been absent since 1946 when the last nesting pair deserted Kingman Island where RFK Stadium now stands.
