Canadian birds bring bald eagle back in U.S.

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This article was published 05/01/2012 (5179 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE bald eagle — the U.S. national bird and a species on the brink of extinction in the lower 48 states just a generation ago — is now thriving again in the heartland of the American Revolution thanks to a series of transplants from Canada.

New Jersey has become the latest U.S. state to celebrate the raptor’s revival, with wildlife officials announcing a “milestone” achievement of 100 nesting pairs at the start of 2012, nearly all descended from the 60 eaglets imported from the bird’s healthier Canadian habitats since the 1980s.

Some of the individual birds introduced from this country may yet be alive and counted among New Jersey’s current bald eagle population.

Eagles have been known to live beyond 30 years in the wild.

“The recovery of the bald eagle from one nesting pair in an isolated swamp in southern New Jersey in the early 1980s to more than 100 pairs today is a truly remarkable success story,” state environmental protection commissioner Bob Martin said in a statement after the release of a report last month that found 102 pairs nesting in the state.

The statement attributed the bird’s recovery “from the edge of extirpation” to a ban on the use of the pesticide DDT and “decades of restoration and management efforts” by New Jersey wildlife officials, who “released 60 eaglets from Canada into New Jersey in the 1980s and early 1990s to rebuild the population.”

DDT was a widely used pesticide that caused fatally thin eggshells among eagles and other bird species in the 1960s and ’70s. The DDT ban was spurred largely by the precipitous decline in bald eagle populations.

 

— Postmedia News