Eagles Back From the Brink

John Chaney was a college student in the 1970s when he decided to document the few remaining American bald eagles before their seemingly inevitable extinction.

The lower 48 had fewer than 450 mating pairs of bald eagles then. He wondered what a United States of America would be like with no bald eagles.

He learned about salmon fishermen awarding bounties for eagles they thought threatened their profession, with 100,000 killed from 1917-1953. He learned about nesting areas destroyed by logging and development. He read up on DDT, used as an agricultural insecticide, thinning the shells of eagle eggs so much they cracked before chicks were ready to hatch. This wasn’t long after the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, when the nation saw images of oil on a Cleveland river in flames, a nadir that spurred the environmental movement.

One of his college professors began listing all the species that had gone extinct in his lifetime. That got Chaney thinking. The professor was “convinced (the eagles) wouldn’t make it another decade or two.”

And then Chaney saw his first bald eagle. He was sitting on a bluff when the eagle came flying down the Mississippi toward him.

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