Bald Eagle Status
By: Jake | July 14, 2008 | Category: Travel
Thanks to Jim for posting last week while I was on vacation. I spent
some time exploring the Pacific Northwest and from the comfort of my
hotel balcony I witnessed our national bird in action. 
One morning I noticed a blackbird attacking a bird sitting on an old dock post. I thought it was a heron, and my girlfriend suggested since the bird was shorter and had a beak and legs smaller than a heron, it might be a bald eagle. She was right, as you can tell from our photographic evidence.
It didn't really cross my mind that we were looking at a bald eagle at the time because when I was a kid the only place I had seen a bald eagle was the zoo. The Pacific Northwest has a large population of bald eagles, but they are making a huge comeback in the rest of the U.S. I know there is a pair of bald eagles nesting here in Alexandria, and my brother tells me he spots them on occasionally when he's driving in Eastern Virginia.
It's hard to believe that in 1782, when the United States adopted the bald eagle as a national symbol, there were as many as 100,000 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the nation. In 1967 that number was down to 417 due to shooting, habitat infringement and the use of DDT pesticide. This is why that same year the Department of Interior began to protect all bald eagles south of the 40th parallel under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966.
By 2006 there were approximately 10,000 nesting bald eagle pairs and the Department of Interior took the birds off the federal list of threatened and endangered species in July 2007 with a promise to monitor the status of the species. Of course we are not back to the 100,000 pairs yet and the recovery process is delicate. By March 2008 DOI had returned bald eagles in the Sonoran
Desert of central Arizona to the federal list of threatened species and
the birds also grace a number of state-level threatened and endangered
species lists. Still I'm happy to know that you don't have to go to the zoo to see a bald eagle anymore.
Permalink
| View Comments [8]
| 
E-mail This Entry
| Tags:
bald_eagle
birds
conservation
jake
threatened_species
Bookmark and share: 
About social bookmarking
RSS Feeds
E-mail Updates
Doc
Comment Permalink
Comment Permalink
Comment Permalink
USA.gov removed the GovGab box to highlight USA.gov's new PSA which will be out soon. You can still get to us by using the link at the top that says "our blog."
Moedemd,
I couldn't find and don't know if there is an exact number that will signify there are "enough" nesting pairs. The Department of Interior removed bald eagles from the endangered list because they reached their goal of 3900 pairs, which is the number they believed would remove the threat of extinction. They still monitor the number of nesting pairs and are quick to point out that people's action (disrupting their habitats) can have an impact on the population. As I said before this is what caused the population to go down so dramatically before.
http://www.fws.gov/midwest/eagle/guidelines/baea_nhstry_snstvty.html
Comment Permalink
I don't think Dr. Moede meant the question seriously. Given that, I'm surprised you took the time to even attempt a serious answer. I suspect his "anti-liberal bias" will prevent him from taking your answer at face value anyway.
Comment Permalink
I thought about not responding, but I try to respond to my harshest critics regardless of whether or not they will take my response at "face value." Thanks for having my back though!
Jake
Comment Permalink
Thanks for the rest of the info. I'm used to seeing such sights as eagles flying, eating, sitting. I knew they had been on the endangered list and hadn't paid attention to what that meant. Every year, there have been more and more flying around in my area.
Comment Permalink
I see Bald Eagles quite often out here on the Allegheny River in Armstrong County area. I always thought they were a "mystical" bird since they were "endangered", but here they are, big as day!
Have fun your farm!
LOL!
Comment Permalink