Jackie, the Big Bear bald eagle who died earlier this week, drew a worldwide following. Her fame sits atop one of America’s great conservation comebacks, which lead poisoning and bird flu are now testing.
On July 23, a wild bald eagle named Jackie received a blood transfusion from another bald eagle. She had been found six days earlier unable to fly after a fight with two younger eagles, and the veterinarians at the Ojai Raptor Center were by then several days into the sort of effort rarely spent on a single wild animal, with oxygen, around-the-clock monitoring, and a donor bird named Spirit. When Jackie died early on August 10, after her kidneys inflamed and her blood count kept falling, the raptor center reached for language usually reserved for people and not used on an animal since the death of Hollywood’s famed mountain lion P-22 nearly four years earlier. “We know this news will be deeply felt by the many thousands of people around the world who have followed her journey,” it said in a statement, and the sentence was not an exaggeration. “Our team is heartbroken. It has been an extraordinary privilege to care for her.”Â
Jackie was, by any reasonable count, among the most-watched wild animals alive. A camera trained on the nest she shared with her partner Shadow in the Jeffrey pines above Big Bear Lake had run since 2015, and for years hundreds of thousands of people checked in on her the way they might check on a relative, through snowstorms that buried her to the shoulders, through eggs that failed, and through the chicks that survived. When the valley’s schoolchildren were invited to name her two eaglets this spring, they had nearly 64,000 suggestions to sort through. The devotion was genuine, and it was concentrated, in the end, on one bird.
That a single eagle could gather a global audience is possible only because eagles stopped being rare, and recently enough that the reversal should still surprise. In 1963, 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles remained in the lower 48 states, thinned toward extinction by the pesticide DDT, which weakened their eggshells until the clutches broke under the weight of the incubating mother. DDT was banned in 1972, the Endangered Species Act followed the next year, and the birds recovered so completely that the federal government removed the bald eagle from the endangered species list in 2007 and now estimates 316,708 bald eagles and 71,467 nesting pairs across the contiguous United States — more than four times the number counted just over a decade earlier. Jackie belonged to that comeback, and so did the audience that mourned her. Neither would have been imaginable in a year when the entire national population could fit in a few hundred nests.
Nearly half of bald eagles carry evidence of chronic lead poisoning, most of it swallowed from the spent ammunition left in the carcasses and gut piles they scavenge, according to a 2022 study in the journal Science. While the cause of Jackie’s death is still unclear, lead is holding the bald eagle’s population growth down by 3.8 percent a year, the study’s authors calculated. “This is the first study of lead poisoning of wildlife at a nationwide scale,” Todd Katzner, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist and one of its authors, said, “and it demonstrates the unseen challenges facing these birds of prey.”
Highly pathogenic avian influenza has added a second pressure that behaves similarly. Along coastal Georgia during the 2022 breeding season, fewer than half of monitored nests fledged a chick, roughly 30 percent below the regional norm, and in one Florida county nesting success fell from about 86.5 percent to 41 percent, according to research led by the University of Georgia. Nicole Nemeth, an associate professor in the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine who led the study, warned that a single bad year does not stay a single year. “Even just one year of losses of productivity like we’ve documented regionally is very concerning,” she said, “and could have effects for decades to come if representative of broader regions.” No livestream was trained on those nests. The eagles that will indicate whether or not the recovery holds are, almost by definition, the ones no one is watching.
Big Bear had, over the years, folded its two star eagles into its sense of itself. “You captured the hearts of Big Bear and so many beyond, reminding us all of the beauty, strength, and wonder of our mountain home,” the Visit Big Bear tourism office wrote when Jackie died. The valley had already lost the human voice of that attachment months earlier. Sandy Steers, who helped launch the nest cameras in 2015 and became the resident narrator and expert on the eagles’ lives, died in February, and when Jackie and Shadow hatched their two chicks this spring, Big Bear’s third-graders named one of them Sandy in her memory.
“Jackie taught us so much about the beauty and resilience of bald eagles, the importance of protecting wildlife, and the special connections we can build with the natural world,” the Los Angeles County parks department wrote after her death. “Her legacy will live on through the countless people who watched, learned, cared and were inspired to protect these magnificent birds.” The eagles that will settle the species’ future are, like most of its members, unnamed and unwatched, dying in the singular far from any nest-cam or third-grade vote. Jackie was the exception, which was the whole of her gift, and also its limit.
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