Entry bubble 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. Bald Eagle on a Pole

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.

Eagle on the sandBy 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.

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