Where Eagles Dare : 4 Young Birds Get a Taste of the Wild Life Their Ancestors Knew

At 4,000 feet and with a view of at least 10 miles in every direction, Marble Peak is the perfect spot to study eagles in flight, wildlife attendant Jerry Granger said as he held a radio receiver in the warm breeze over the Santa Lucia Range.

Until last month, however, it had been a long time since there were any eagles to see here. The bald eagle disappeared from the area with the completion of California 1 more than half a century ago.

The Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary, a private, nonprofit wildlife preservation group based in Carmel Valley, released four eaglets between July 4 and 17, however, and America’s symbolic and endangered bird has once again spread its wings over California’s central coast.

And now, the steady beep from Granger’s receiver indicated that an eaglet, equipped with a tiny transmitter, was perched in a nearby tree.

“It’s pretty exciting when you are sitting here and the eagles come soaring over your head,” said Deborah von Gonten, 39, Granger’s fellow attendant who spends up to six hours a day watching the 14-week-old eagles around their release site in Anderson Canyon. “It makes me want to be an eagle.”

The four young birds, brought from Vancouver Island, Canada, under permit from state, federal and Canadian wildlife agencies, still return daily for handouts of fish, rabbit, goose or ground squirrel left by attendants at the release site, a 30-foot-high, man-made platform, said Glenn Stewart, wildlife biologist and director of Ventana’s bald eagle reintroduction program. The birds will be given food until they can sustain themselves in the wild, Stewart said.

Only two miles from the rugged Big Sur shoreline, the site is in the middle of a 240-acre sanctuary owned by Carmel real estate broker Sal Lucido and Carmel Valley veterinarian Gerald Petkus, who started the group in 1977.

Ron Jurek, wildlife biologist for the California Fish and Game Department, said the Ventana program is one of two bald eagle reintroduction projects in the state. Since 1980, the Arcata-based Institute for Wildlife Studies has sponsored a similar breeding project in the Channel Islands, where about 18 breeding pairs are sighted regularly.

Government wildlife agencies welcome such private initiatives, Jurek said, because government funding is barely enough to protect existing bald eagle populations. Statewide, the number of bald eagles increased from 41 in 1979 to 68 in 1986, and those figures still have to double before the bird can be taken off the endangered species list, he said.

Stewart said the $30,000-project, funded by corporations and the 700 club members of the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary, will bring about 40 eagles from Alaska and Canada to Los Padres National Forest over the next three years.

Based on bald eagle release projects in other parts of the country, Jurek estimated that only 10% of the eagles released at Ventana will return and breed along the central coast.

“Very few birds of prey make it through the first two years,” Petkus said. “That’s because of food supply problems, diseases, accidents and the time it takes for the bird to become an effective hunter. At Ventana we try to supply them with food at a very critical stage, just after they fledge.”

Although the eagles will probably migrate north for the autumn salmon runs, they are expected to start nesting here when they reach sexual maturity in four to five years, Stewart said.

Despite the abundant food supply, wilderness protection and nesting space (usually in redwood tree tops) in the Santa Lucia Range, lingering DDT pesticide residue in the food chain limits the eagles’ biological ability to produce calcium for their eggs, Jurek said, pointing out that although the use of DDT in the United States was banned in 1972, it still is widely used in Central and South America. The lack of calcium produces very fragile egg shells that often break prematurely, Petkus said.

“We have seen a decline in bald eagle populations because of human stupidity,” said Granger, 30, who earns $600 a month looking after the bald eagles at the sanctuary. “This job is my way of paying them back.”

Granger and Von Gonten take food to the platform before dawn, while the eagles are roosting. Contact with humans is avoided to prevent mistaken identity, Stewart said. “This way, they look at each other and discover quickly that they are eagles,” he said.

When the birds soar above Marble Peak, they occasionally go within 200 feet of the attendants’ observation site. “Close enough to see their eyeballs through a pair of binoculars,” Von Gonten said. “That’s when you want to go up there and join them.”