If you see a bald eagle soaring above Lake George, it is safe to assume that it is descended from one of the scores released in New York State in the 1970s and 80s.
There was nothing inevitable about the return of the bald eagle to the Adirondacks.
It began, inauspiciously enough, in 1975 with a note in the official publication of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation informing readers that New York hoped to re-establish the raptor.
They had been all but exterminated from the state and its last known nesting grounds – the Adirondacks – as a consequence of pesticides, loss of habitat and hunting.
No one was more committed to restoring the bald eagle to New York than its gentlemanly Environmental Conservation Commissioner, Ogden Reid, who found $5,000 for the project in his agency’s budget.
And without Tina Milburn Morris, an unassuming anthropology major from Oberlin College who became, almost by accident, the first person in the U.S. to foster bald eagle chicks, to raise them to adolescence and release them into the wilds, the bald eagle might still be a rarity in New York State.
Morris herself is fully aware of how unlikely her part was in one of the great conservation success stories of our time; she frankly admits as much in her engaging memoir Return to the Sky: The Surprising Story of How One Woman and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle (2024).
Morris had found herself in the right place at the right time, at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, in 1976, as a graduate student in need of a research topic.
She was tasked by Dr. Tom Cade of the Ornithology lab with the eaglets’ hacking – that is, raising them to become independent flyers, predators and breeders without the benefit of adult birds as instructors.
Morris spent a summer alone with two birds that were captured in Wisconsin and brought to the Finger Lakes, where she fed them carp and roadkill and watched them eat, preen and flap their wings, all while recording her detailed observations.
By the end of her second summer in the Finger Lakes, Morris had successfully hacked seven birds, two of whom went on to breed and produce two chicks in the wild.
A rehabbed eagle from Michigan that Morris released in 1977 produced at least 70 eaglets with two different mates over a 35-year period.
In 1981, the first 21 of roughly 200 eagles captured in Alaska were introduced to New York by the Endangered Species Unit of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
By the summer of 1988, when the restoration program was declared a success and disbanded by the DEC, ten pairs of bald eagles were breeding and fledging young birds.
Dr. Ed Becker, now retired and living in Hague, NY (on Lake George), was the consulting veterinarian for the DEC’s Endangered Species Unit.
“In 1976, there was a documented population of 800 bald eagles in the lower 48 states, but 30,000 in Alaska, so it made a great deal of sense to go there to find eaglets to be hacked in New York State. They became a part of the source of the breeding population that we have here today,” said Becker.
As the Endangered Species Unit’s veterinarian, Becker examined every eaglet after DEC’s wildlife biologists
unloaded it from the plane.
“I gave each one a complete physical – weight, bloodwork, tests for infections and exams for abnormalities. Only then could it be sent to a hacking tower to be raised until it was old enough to fly and fend for itself,” said Becker.
Of the members of “the class of 1981” initially examined by Becker, one was electrocuted, two were shot and two others were found dead.
Another “class” could have been entirely obliterated by a vitamin deficiency – something Becker diagnosed with the help of the hematology laboratory at St. Peter’s Hospital in Schenectady.
By the mid 1980s, New York was home to at least three documented pairs of nesting eagles. By 2014, there were more than 300 pairs.
“Today, it’s anybody’s guess how many active nests there are in New York, but it’s somewhere between 325 and 350,” said Becker.
Although its bald eagle restoration program was terminated in 1989, New York State continues to play a role in the recovery of the raptor.
The Forest Preserve lands on Lake George and other parts of the Adirondacks provide the eagle with nesting grounds, and its range expands as more habitat is acquired through the acquisition of land and conservation easements.
And, thanks to the DEC and Cornell University and people like Tina Morris and Ed Becker, New York now serves as a global model and example. These institutions and individuals catalyzed an experiment that is
replicated wherever endangered birds are found.
Read more about Bald Eagles in New York.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Photo of a bald eagle above Lake George by Bill Alexy, courtesy Unsplash.
