How the bald eagle soared again

By A.R. | CHICAGO

AN AVIAN stalker follows the course of a shallow river in Wisconsin. The river’s edge is wooded; fish occasionally leap from the water. With a beat of its dark wings, a bald eagle glides along, its head white in the early autumn sunshine. Tourists witnessing the majestic sight might believe they are seeing something rare. They are not. The bird, America’s national symbol, was driven almost to extinction in the 1960s, but its population is soaring again. In June 2007 federal officials said it no longer even counts as an endangered species. Its recovery is a dramatic environmental success. What made bald eagles great again?

The eagle’s fall was dramatic. By one estimate America had some 100,000 nesting pairs in 1782, when it was chosen as the national symbol because of its evident freedom and strength. (Benjamin Franklin lamented the choice, though, describing the eagle as a bird of “bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.”) Within a century its numbers had plummeted. The reasons were various. Settlers cleared the nesting habitats and waterways that were home to waterfowl and other prey. Farmers saw the birds as destructive scavenger-predators and hunted them. (They did have some grounds for complaint: a farmer of free-range chickens in Georgia, for example, blames bald eagles on his property for killing stock worth millions of dollars over recent years.) And the birds were poisoned by accident, because they scavenged smaller birds that had already been filled with lead shot by hunters. By 1940 Congress noted that the eagles faced probable extinction, and passed an act that forbade people to do them any harm. By 1963 only 487 nesting pairs survived in mainland America, though Alaska had a healthier population.