When Tolbert, then a city worker, reported his sighting, biologists were flabbergasted. Eagles are shy birds that prefer forests and farmland -- not a panoramic view of several apartment complexes, a national airport and the screaming jets of Bolling Air Force Base.
"Twenty years ago, we would have said no way in hell," said Glenn Therres, an eagle expert at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "But there they were."
The two are what scientists call "urban eagles," displaying an unusual willingness to tolerate levels of human activity they avoided for decades -- understandably, considering the threat man posed.
The question of just how much more noise and habitat destruction the eagles will withstand has been simmering for months, putting the emblem of America's strength at the center of a post-Sept. 11 dilemma: balancing natural resources and national security.
In the process -- buried in environmental impact reports hardly anybody reads and mentioned at meetings hardly anyone attends -- the city that brims with history discovered a treasure most didn't know it had.
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Congress Heights sits in one of the district's most troubled corners, not far from where the Anacostia and Potomac rivers meet. Crime is high. Liquor stores dot the main road. Some residents have a habit of dumping their trash in the woods -- an old refrigerator, a storm door, whiskey bottles.
It would seem an unlikely spot for a nest-scouting pair of bald eagles, except for a patch of old forest called Shepherd Parkway, part of what's left of a chain of Civil War-era forts erected to defend the capital. There the birds found a ravine deep enough to shield their young from the wind, and rivers teeming with fish. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Soon they were a neighborhood fixture. Schoolchildren on the way to the bus would listen for their squeaky whistle; dog walkers marveled at their 8-foot wingspan.
Chicks hatched in the spring and before the neighbors knew it, eaglets 18 inches tall were scooting onto branches, exercising their wings. By summer, they were flying, cavorting like teenagers in packs, unremarkable brown raptors until age 5, when the white pate would sprout and they were all at once magnificent.
"Ten-thirty is when they usually come around; they like to play," Dominick Butler, 67, said as he mowed a lawn on the edge of the woods, peering into the sun in hopes of a glimpse.
