Pennsylvania Game News - July 2013 - 27

in Crawford County’s PymatuningConneaut Marsh region. The rest of
the state, which once harbored nesting
eagles along the Delaware, Schuylkill,
Susquehanna, Juniata, Allegheny
and Ohio rivers, and in the Poconos
pothole country, was without nesters.
Gone with them were nesting ospreys
and peregrines. It was a difficult time
for wildlife managers; corrective legislation was in place and healing had
started, but there wasn’t a nearby population from which to draw new nesters. Pennsylvania — in fact the whole
Northeast — needed young eagles to
establish territories. Getting them was
the problem.
Part of this recruitment quandary
stemmed from the bald eagle’s low
numbers. But it also was being impacted by, of all things, the Bald Eagle
Protection Act of 1940, which stipulated only bald eagles from the United
States could be released in the United
States. Since the Lower 48 had an eagle
shortage, it left Alaska as a sole source.
The only promising ways to rebuild the Northeast’s population were
through translocations, fostering eggs
and young, and hacking eaglets. These
approaches offered the greatest hope
that whatever was raised in a geographic region would eventually nest
in there. The key was getting eaglets
to fledgling age. Many eagle eggs were
lost, because DDT weakened eggshells
and parents broke them during incubation. Adding healthy eggs to thinshelled clutches, or hatched young to
nests offered hope. So, too, did hacking, translocating eaglets from other
areas to elevated enclosures, where
they are raised with minimal human
contact and allowed to fledge into the
wild when they come of age.
JULY 2013

Maine took the first stab at bolstering the Northeast’s eagles through egg
transplants in 1974. Two years later,
New York tried hacking with eaglets
from Alaska. But the Last Frontier
had its limitations; it couldn’t supply
chicks for a Northeast reintroduction.
However, a 1982 exchange of gifts
between Germany and the White
House, interestingly, was about to create an unprecedented opportunity for
America’s bald eagles.
Former German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt wanted to give President
Ronald Reagan two captive bald eagles
from Germany to commemorate the
200th anniversary of the bald eagle’s
adoption by Congress as our national
emblem. But the Bald Eagle Protection
Act stood in the gift’s way, because
the birds were from Germany, not the
United States. A Department of Interior lawyer soon was asked to assess
whether the act was being interpreted
properly. He soon concluded — surprise — the 40-year-old law was being
misinterpreted: it prohibited the importation of eagles by only individuals,
not governments. So, Schmidt got to
give his eagles to President Reagan. But
the seemingly inconsequential decision
that paved the way for the gift-giving
was recognized astutely by others in the
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as clearance to use North America’s reservoir
of bald eagles in Canada to fuel a bald
eagle comeback in the Northeast and
elsewhere. Up until that decision,
which now is seen by many as a milestone in bald eagle conservation, those
birds were off limits.
The feds didn’t waste any time getting a plan together: eaglets would be
taken from nests in cooperating Canadian provinces and hacked by four
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Pennsylvania Game News - July 2013

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