When I first moved up here in 1991 there were no bald eagles soaring over Lake Nubanusit. I would never have been able to watch one of these breathtaking raptors glide over the Hancock Elementary School schoolyard with the most excited third grade bird watchers you could ever imagine. Back in 1991 I could have spent every minute of every day searching the Monadnock Region for bald eagles and I would have found none. No-one would have. There were none in this part of the state. I would have had to travel about four and half hours north to Lake Umbagog, where the only known nesting pair in the entire state of New Hampshire had only just returned in 1989.
Maybe you remember this time in New Hampshire and actually across the whole United States when the bald eagle population was so low that at one point there were estimated to be only 413 nesting pairs. There hadn’t been a nesting pair in the state of NH since 1949. Many factors had led to the decline in the bald eagle population. Habitat destruction and degradation, illegal shooting and the impact of the chemical pesticide known as DDT on their eggs are all part of the story of how this bird of prey, once plentiful across the entire US had ended up in such dire circumstances.
With the banning of DDT in 1972 and the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, bald eagles stood a fighting chance. As a society, our elected officials chose to support legislation and laws that protected the eagle and other animals, making it possible to protect their health and habitat.
One late spring day in 1998 while canoeing at Robb Reservoir in Stoddard, we spied an adult eagle actively hunting for fish. I had never seen a bald eagle until that moment. At first we thought we were mistaken. We couldn’t imagine what an adult eagle was doing here during nesting season. We paddled the entire perimeter of the reservoir searching for a nest site. A few weeks later the first nest in the Monadnock Region since prior to the 1940’s was discovered on Lake Nubanusit. The pair of eagles had built their nest in a huge pine tree that had once been the site of a local rope swing.
In 1999 when the eagle pair returned again, Christian Martin, senior biologist at New Hampshire Audubon and responsible for managing programs to monitor NH’s raptor populations, soon determined that the female had a unique history. He was able to ascertain that she had a band around her talon and the numbers on her band showed that she had come from Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts and had been raised in a captive breeding program.
W22 as she was known was born in 1992 to two flightless eagles in the care of master falconer and raptor rehabilitator Tom Ricardi. She was reared on Little Quabbin Island where she was raised to be a “wild” eagle by her caretaker who used an eagle hand puppet to feed and care for her. Puppets were used so all the young in this program would not imprint on the human faces of their caretakers. Once ready to fledge the cages were opened and the young eagles were free to fly.
W22 made Nubanusit her home with her mate. It took her a bit of time to find a successful mate but from 2004 to 2011, with her mate they fledged 19 young together. In October 2011, she died at the age of 19 and half years old, the oldest wild eagle in the state of NH.
By 2007 the bald eagle was removed from the federal government’s Endangered and Threatened Species list. Its return from the edge of extinction was considered a success. This is what progress for the planet can look like. Eagles are now not only nesting on Nubanusit but also on other area lakes like Powder Mill Pond and Granite Lake. You can be walking in downtown Peterborough and be treated to catching a glimpse of a bald eagle flying along the river. You can be swimming at Willard Pond and see an eagle come soaring over Bald Mountain.
When we see one of these iconic raptors soaring along above us, take a moment and watch it. This bird you are seeing was literally on almost completely wiped out. It took a lot of hard work, focused attention, partnerships, and funding to reverse its decline. Most important it took us as a people to agree that animals, like the bald eagle were worth saving. Imagine if we hadn’t. The bald eagle would have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, extinct, never to soar through the blue skies of anywhere ever again.
Maybe you remember this story – how our national symbol had been almost wiped out by the chemical pesticide DDT? Starting in 1945, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, DDT, was used regularly as an insecticide on agricultural crops as well as to control diseases that could be spread by insects to humans until it was banned in 1972. DDT had some unintended and unforeseen consequences that author and scientist Rachel Carson brought to the public light in her groundbreaking book “Silent Spring”, published in 1962. DDT was linked to the thinning of egg shells. Birds, like eagles, that ate other animals that had been exposed to this chemical, had the an accumulation of it in their system. The result was their egg shells were so thin that the eggs would crack and crumble leading to the death of the unborn chick.
After 1945, and commercial usage of DDT became widespread in the U.S. The early popularity of DDT, a member of the chlorinated hydrocarbon group, was due to its reasonable cost, effectiveness, persistence, and versatility. During the 30 years prior to its cancellation, a total of approximately 1,350,000,000 pounds of DDT was used domestically.
Susie Spikol is Community Programs Director & Teacher-Naturalist with the Harris Center in Hancock.