Bald eagles find themselves new home: Suburbia
LOS ANGELES — For much of the spring, a constant flow of people arrived at a dirt pullout on a mountain road a few miles above Azusa, each craving a glimpse of 10-pound celebrities with 7-foot wingspans and the charisma that politicians can only dream of.
These were bald eagles, after all, the bird that spreads its wings on every dollar bill and U.S. passport. And their nest atop a pine tree overlooking a reservoir on one side and Highway 39 on the other offered a full picture of home life for these majestic raptors. It was the first time bald eagles had nested in this part of the San Gabriel Mountains in 70 years.
Voices oh-wowed. Cameras clicked. Faces smiled, and photos and video footage immediately spread on Facebook and Instagram of two energetic fledglings braving their first flights out of the brown bundle of sticks, and shrieking like high-pitched, neighing horses when their parents returned with fresh fish for dinner.
The fledglings and their watchful parents are part of a new breed of “urban eagles” moving into Southern California and throughout the nation, displaying an unusual tolerance for the clatter and commotion of city life.
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.
The U.S. Forest Service, protector of wildlife in the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, is facing up to a mass of conflicts: government regulation verses appreciation of nature; public access verses public safety; aggressive wildlife photographers verses eaglets trying to take wing.
Carie Battistone, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, summed up the situation: “Urban eagle births are definitely increasing — along with the number of people wanting to get real close to them. So, these urban eagles are a lot of work.”
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.
“Those signs are intended to manage humans more than to protect the eagles,” sighed Nathan Sill, a biologist for the Forest Service whose duties included monitoring the nest. “We get some real knuckleheads, and they make it tough on all of us.”
Some eagle lovers have blocked traffic by setting up tripods in the middle of the road; others have tossed rocks at the eagles to get them to turn around and face a camera. A few have been cited for trespassing.
“We’ve had incidents,” Sill added, shaking his head, “in which fire trucks en route to a traffic accident with lights flashing and sirens blaring were unable to get through the crowd on the highway.”
Many raptors are having a hard time in Southern California. Burrowing owls, short-eared owls and golden eagles are extremely sensitive to human presence and steadily disappearing from the landscape.
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.
For instance, a pair of eagles that hatched on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa Barbara recently reared eaglets roughly 45 miles to the east in the Orange County residential area of Anaheim Hills. They nested in the upper reaches of a eucalyptus tree with panoramic views of rush-hour traffic on the Riverside Freeway.
Near the city of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains, a hidden camera has streamed popular, intimate scenes of adult bald eagles building a nest, laying eggs, feeding babies and circling nearby as they learned to fly — or even tumbled to their deaths.
Trouble is, that nest overlooks the last parcel of undeveloped lakefront property in Big Bear Valley, which is the focus of an ambitious subdivision proposal that is testing the resolve of San Bernardino County policymakers attempting to preserve the area’s nesting eagles, while upholding property rights and commerce.
Big Bear Lake is among dozens of reservoirs built from the 1920s to the 1960s that are now havens for eagles. In the Sacramento area, wildlife authorities posted warning signs and strung up yellow tape to steer eagle fans away from two nests overlooking hiking trails at Lake Natoma, just south of Folsom.