Almost 200 years after the bald eagle was chosen as the emblem of the United States in 1782, the species was threatened with extinction due to DDT poisoning. The nation’s symbol owes its survival to a translocation program that captured young bald eagles in Southeast Alaska and flew them to New York and other Lower 48 states to initiate a repopulation program. 

Biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” brought attention to the devastating impacts of DDT, sprayed widely in areas of the Lower 48 states during the 1950s and 1960s. The insecticide application resulted in mass die-offs of birds and other animals. Birds’ eggshells were too soft to nurture the chicks within. Bald eagles suffered overwhelming population losses of primarily nestling birds. Eggs were not hatching.

The book’s title “Silent Spring” refers to the sudden quiet caused by the deaths of birds whose songs normally filled the air with sound after winter. The dramatic losses of birds observed in backyards and farmlands prompted Carson to delve into the poisons used to eradicate insects. In a chapter titled “And No Birds Sing,” she reports on bald eagles, noting that nest failure trends in New Jersey and Pennsylvania “…may well make it necessary for us to find a new national emblem.” 

Hope was on the horizon. DDT was banned in 1972. Within four years, officials in the State of New York believed the habitat could once again support a population of bald eagles. The birds live only in North America.

Fifty years ago New York initiated a repopulation program with funding from the 1973 Endangered Species Act that provided money for similar state programs. It started out of desperation to save the last nesting bald eagle pair in the state. Peter Nye, a retired New York Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife biologist, told the Juneau Independent in a telephone interview on June 17 how the initiative got started.

“The program was based on a successful restoration project for peregrine falcons,” Nye said. He and his colleagues practiced on the sole nesting eagle pair remaining in New York. They climbed up the nest tree — no small feat — and replaced a thin-shelled egg with a fake egg for the parents to incubate. After the appropriate 34 days, the biologists returned to the nest and substituted tiny live eaglets in place of the placebo eggs. The parents raised the chicks to fledging. The experiment worked well with bald eagles. It was the beginning of the restoration of the birds in the eastern U.S.

“At the time, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania had no nesting eagles, neither did Vermont or New Hampshire,” Nye said. Those states began talking with him about replicating his program.

The project coincided with the country’s Bicentennial in 1976, thus receiving attention for saving the national symbol. The initial New York project was extremely labor-intensive due to the 24-hour care the very young birds required. To sustain the program, however, an abundant supply of nestling eagles was needed. The birds needed to be old enough to endure capture and transportation.

They turned to Alaska where eagles were thriving, unlike the Lower 48 states where eagles were threatened or endangered. The wildlife biologists determined the ideal age was about seven weeks old, in July. At that age the young eagles could survive without parental attention during the usual intensive chick-rearing process. Older nestlings were capable of tearing apart food to eat and regulating their body temperature. But they could not yet fly so they were easier to handle. 

After considerable planning with Alaskan officials, New York state in 1981 was granted permission to take 20 single nestling eagles from nests in Southeast Alaska.  

Peter Nye flew to Juneau and teamed up with local wildlife biologist Jack Hodges, the bald eagle specialist in Alaska for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Both men were young and early in their careers. Hodges knew where nests were located. He had been identifying bald eagle nests for habitat protection as clearcut logging operations in Southeast Alaska kicked into high gear.

The first year of the program, Nye, Hodges and the translocation team worked rapidly aboard the USFWS’s vessel M/V Surfbird. Within five days, they had collected 17 young birds from different nests, fed and cared for the eaglets (the biologists used rod and reel to catch fish), placed them in special individual crates and flown them to New York on a chartered plane. There, the birds were placed in “hacking towers” (artificial nests) where there was minimal human contact to prevent imprinting on people. The eaglets were fed and tended before releasing when the nestlings were old enough to fly. There was concern about how the young birds would survive without normal parental guidance which is a three-month-long process in the nest and more time once the young have flown. Parents teach their nestlings how to fish and catch food. 

From 1981 to 1993, Nye, Hodges and others collected nestling eagles for translocation. Nearly 400 of Alaska’s young eagles repopulated New York, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and Tennessee.

 

Speaking of the once-barren states he helped rejuvenate with similar programs, Nye said, “They all started releasing eagles and that’s how the whole northeast population got rebuilt.” New York now has 450 breeding pairs and Pennsylvania has more than 400 pairs.

Today, webcams provide live video of eagles’ nests in many U.S. locations. Observers can watch mated pairs refurbish their nests, incubate eggs and raise chicks through explore.org, a site known for its live-streaming web camera videos featuring Alaska’s popular salmon-fishing brown bears of Katmai National Park.

Both Nye and Hodges are retired now. They have had time to reflect on their roles in restoring the birds.

Nye remarked about the joy he felt early in the project when a pair of Alaska-born New York eagles successfully nested on their own and raised a family. Two of the first released birds were found 84 miles from their hacking site, showing they could repopulate new areas over long distances.

“It’s been a very, very exciting and rewarding project to have been involved with,” Nye said. New York is celebrating the 50th anniversary this year since the state translocation program began. 

Hodges spoke of similar emotions. “I really felt that what I was doing was important,” he said in an interview on June 11, “because wherever we found an eagle nest we were able to protect habitat from being clearcut logged or otherwise developed because it was against the law.” He was pleased, he added, “when I able to put a sign on a tree on Forest Service land and know that I was protecting an average of 5.5 acres of eagle habitat on the shoreline. The biggest thing that made me feel good was the ability to protect more habitat.”

Hodges has written about his work in a 2017 memoir titled “Above and Beyond, Life of An Alaskan Aviator and Voyager.” In it, Hodges says,

“Alaska’s bald eagles were called upon to help rescue, in a sense, our national bird in the continental United States. One hundred years ago the state of New York had an estimated 70 pairs of bald eagles. By 1975, only one pair remained,” Hodges wrote. 

 

Steve Lewis, USFWS wildlife biologist with the Migratory Bird Program in Juneau, told the Juneau Independent on June 23, that locally “the eagle population is strong.” 

Ironically, at one time there was a bounty in Alaska on eagles due to the unfounded concern by fishermen the birds were responsible for the decline in salmon. From 1917 until 1953, a bounty was paid of 50 cents per pair of eagle feet. During that period more than 120,000 eagles were killed, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website. Bald eagles were threatened or endangered in the Lower 48 states during the time of the restoration program. They were removed from the threatened and endangered species list in 2007, but remain protected under other laws.

New York’s Peter Nye summed up the eagle restoration program well.

“It’s also super good that our 50th anniversary of returning the national symbol to New York, which also influenced a greater amount of area in the northeastern United States, falls on the 250th anniversary of our country,” Nye said.

• Contact Laurie Craig at [email protected].

This story was originally published by the Juneau Independent.