Government regulation vs. appreciation of nature; public access vs. public safety; wildlife photographers vs. eaglets trying to fly. These are the issues to grapple with as the first bald eagles in 70 years nest in this part of the San Gabriel Mountains.
But with nature’s bounty come agonizingly complex issues for wildlife authorities as these scrappy, opportunistic and highly social creatures — which all but vanished in the 1970s — return to former native lands since transformed by urban sprawl.
As word of the eagles’ nest above Azusa spread this year, crowds would spill out onto the two-lane highway. Law enforcement authorities arrived to secure the scene.The “no trespassing” signs posted along a chain-link fence skirting a hairpin turn of the highway less than 100 yards from the nest are not the kind you see every day: violations, they warn in large red letters, are punishable by fines of up to $10,000.
But bald eagles, now thriving in the Channel Islands and Santa Catalina Island after they were reintroduced there nearly four decades ago, are following their natural instinct to disperse and discovering new habitat on the mainland. Then there’s Milpitas, just north of San Jose in the bustling heart of Silicon Valley, where a family of bald eagles resides in a redwood tree at an elementary school. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials were honored as local heroes a year ago after they used a bucket-truck ladder to rescue a fledgling that had fallen from the nest and was stranded on a branch.
“Bald eagles are among the few raptors that are unafraid to dive head on into humanity,” he said. “They are predators, but roughly 50% of their diet is scavenged. In Alaska, they often feast on wolf kills. Elsewhere, they hang out at garbage dumps. As the U.S. population grew, they were reviled as nuisance predators and routinely shot and driven from their treetop aeries by logging, farming and home building. By the 1950s, the spread of the pesticide DDT, which thins eagle eggshells, had led to a catastrophic decline. The iconic raptors plummeted from an estimated half a million nesting pairs at the time of the European settlement to 417 in 1963.
“They have clashing personalities,” photographer Neil Smith, 66, said one morning while setting up a tripod. “One of them is larger, rambunctious and had a tendency to flap hard, rise several feet into the air, and then plop down, nearly biffing his sibling out of the nest.” Aching for a good shot, Smith, who moved to the United States from England, muttered: “Come on, mate, turn around and face the camera. A photo of a bald eagle is no good unless you can see the yellow of its eyes.”In 1782, the U.S. Continental Congress made the bald eagle the national emblem, the living embodiment of honesty, courage and power.
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