Eagle Scouts : Recreation: At Santa Barbara’s Lake Cachuma, visitors can ‘spy’ on the rare bald eagle. But the drought is having an effect on the eagles’ numbers.

“Up, over there!” came a voice from the aft of the Cachuma Queen.

The lone declaration was enough to trigger a frenzied, five-minute fusillade of clicking cameras and whirring camcorders from stem to stern.

Skipper George Hughes then angled the flat-bottomed boat so all 28 passengers could further zoom in on the elusive quarry perched on a snag of a coastal oak 300 feet above the cove.

Through the cross hairs of their powerful Telephoto lenses appeared the image of a mature bald eagle. Its snowy head, hooded beak, hunched shoulders, billowing brown chest, ivory tail and featherless feet now were strikingly clear.

“Hey, this is great,” said passenger Joe Zant, 15, of Eugene, Ore., who spent a recent morning eagle-watching on Lake Cachuma. “I mean you go through life seeing eagles on dollar bills and football helmets, but you rarely see one in person.”

Nationally, the numbers of bald eagles are on the rise after years of poaching and chemical contamination nearly made them extinct. But now Southern California’s drought--and lower water levels--are causing the numbers here to drop. In this year’s annual count, wildlife officials tallied 13 eagles at Lake Cachuma. Last year, 28 of the fish-eating birds were spotted.

Officials say eagles, which migrate here from Northern California, Oregon, western Canada and Alaska because of the warmer weather and abundance of food, are going elsewhere where food supplies are more plentiful.

The drought, now in its sixth year, “is constantly causing shifts in where they spend the winter. They may be going to the coast or staying farther north. Nobody really knows,” said park naturalist Neal Taylor.

What is known is that several weeks ago in the annual eagle count at Santa Barbara County’s Lake Cachuma Recreation Area, park naturalists, docents and volunteers counted 15 fewer eagles than last year. This month and early next month are the best times to spot the birds.

“You never assume you’re going to see anything,” said George Hughes, a retired geologist who serves as a park docent and lake guide. “They’re wild animals, and they march to their own drummer.”

Said fellow docent and bird watcher George Smith: “It’s not Disneyland up here. You don’t go around a curve and have something pop up. Every day is different.”

Cruise boats will not approach closer than 200 yards of roosting sites because eagles do not like human intrusion.

“If they are forced to fly too much,” Smith said, “they will simply leave the area and go where they are not disturbed.”

The eagles share Lake Cachuma with 275 species of year-round and migratory birds and waterfowl, including great blue herons, osprey, red-tailed hawks, mergansers, loons, egrets and Canada geese. Also sharing Lake Cachuma’s 26 miles of shoreline are bears, beaver, bobcats and black-tailed deer.

“Cachuma is a unique habitat this close to a metropolitan area,” Taylor said. “People come here from all over the world.”

In winter, they come to see the bald eagles, the designated national symbol despite the protestations of Benjamin Franklin, who thought eagles were a poor choice.

Franklin’s first choice--the turkey--almost won by default this century when the eagle was at the brink of extinction. Chemical contaminants passing through the food chain--especially DDT--weakened the shells of eagle eggs, causing thousands of fledglings to hatch prematurely and die.

By 1960, wildlife experts estimated that about 350 nesting pairs remained, a dramatic decline from the roughly 50,000 bald eagles that patrolled the continental United States in Franklin’s day. Their numbers have since improved to about 2,400 nesting pairs, according to the National Audubon Society.

Their partial comeback is attributable to the banning of DDT in 1972 and to stiff fines (up to $5,000) and jail sentences of one-year for eagle-poachers.

Talk on the Cachuma Queen is often directed toward helping passengers understand what they see. For example, en route to one of the eagle’s suspected haunts, several novice bird watchers may cry “eagle” when the bird is, in fact, a resident turkey vulture. The bald eagle, Hughes explains, soars through the sky with wings almost flat, while vultures are very unstable flyers, holding their wings at a V-shaped angle.

As an osprey or “fish eagle” cruised the lake, Hughes explained that the bird, if literate, could read newsprint two miles away, a keen advantage when espying fish below the water.

Although Lake Cachuma remains a nurturing home for bald eagles and a rich variety of wildlife, it is in danger of becoming a paradise lost.

Born of the 1953 construction of Bradbury Dam on the Santa Inez River, the 7.5-mile lake is 85 feet below its original fill level. The drought and a service area population of 260,000--more than three times the dam’s projected use--are mostly to blame for the shrinking water supply.

“Between the combination of the two, we are in lots of trouble,” Hughes warned.

The lake has dwindled to about 30,000 acre feet of water from its high-water mark of 206,000 acre feet, and roughly 15,000 of that is being harvested each year, Hughes said. “It’s liable to be dry in a couple, three years,” he added. “You can do the arithmetic.”

Eagles fly to Lake Cachuma for the winter in part because of the rainbow trout--a favorite eagle food.

But as water levels drop, the fish population will drop--and so will the number of eagles.

“Bald eagles in Southern California are deriving most of their food from lake and reservoir habitats, so it stands to reason as lake levels fall their food sources will dwindle accordingly,” says Kimble Garrett, Los Angeles Audubon Society member and ornithologist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

Neal Taylor, a naturalist at the lake for 11 years, takes daily inventory of the drought’s effects.

“We’re still seeing the varieties of wildlife,” he said. “We’re just not seeing the numbers.”

As an example, he guessed there would be 8,000 Canada geese on the lake by February, a plentiful number until compared with the 40,000 to 50,000 of the species of just a few years ago.

But Taylor noted that the drought has had its beneficial side.

“There’s new growth in marginal areas of the lake,” he said. “When the water covers up the exposed areas again, the fish will have new spawning and feeding areas. It will be a whole new lake.”

As the Cachuma Queen returned to the marina, Smith recalled the rainy years of ‘69, ’82 and ‘83, which would have filled the lake three times over, he said. Then he asked his passengers “to look at the lake with your eyes, but to remember it with your hearts.”

“In this area,” he said, “we have trees that forecast rain, flowers that tell time, spiders that fly and seeds that walk.

“But they only become unique when we take the time to stop and observe them and enjoy what nature has given us.”

Tours depart Cachuma Marina at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and at 10 a.m. on weekends, with additional tours at 3 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Tickets are $8 for adults and $5 for children under 12.

Bring along a jacket or Windbreaker in case of unpredictable lake breezes. Binoculars also are recommended, although a limited number are available on board.

To reach Lake Cachuma, about 115 miles north of Los Angeles, take U.S. 101 north to the San Marcos Pass (Highway 154) and head northwest to the lake. There is a $3.50 parking fee.

For information and reservations, call (800) 568-2460.

BALD FACTS ABOUT EAGLES * The eagle diet is about 80% fish. But they also like gophers, rats and other small animals.

* An eagle’s average length is 30 to 40 inches, with a wingspan of 78 to 98 inches.

* At 12 weeks, immature bald eagles are as large as their parents, but they don’t display the distinctive white plumage on their heads and tails until their fourth or fifth year.

* Females are larger than males.

* Bald eagles take their name not from their heads but from their bald feet.

* Eagles typically live 20 to 25 years.

* Eagles mate for life. Should its mate die, the survivor goes through a period of mourning that lasts at least 18 months before it selects another mate. In some cases, the mourning period lasts the eagle’s lifetime.