Bald Eagle Revival Slow to Take Wing : Wildlife: Eleven years and $400,000 later, David Garcelon is still trying to re-establish the bird on Catalina. But DDT continues to damage eggs 29 years after it was banned.

David Garcelon vividly remembers when he set out for Santa Catalina Island with a mission to re-establish a breeding bald eagle population.

“How hard could the job be?” he recalls thinking.

Bring baby eagles to the island, raise them until they are old enough to care for themselves and let Mother Nature do the rest.

“I thought I was getting into a project of releasing birds for several years and then sitting back,” says the 38-year-old Garcelon.

Eleven years and $400,000 later, however, a frustrated--and nearly broke--Garcelon is still trying to bring the majestic bird back to the island, where it lived before development, illegal hunting and finally the pesticide DDT caused it to disappear 30 years ago.

Garcelon and other eagle experts now say they underestimated the staying power of the outlawed pesticide, which, 29 years after it was banned, still prevents island eagles from laying healthy eggs.

“We thought the contamination was low enough where we could restore the species,” said Ron Jurek, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game. “And we were wrong.”

Garcelon’s efforts to bring the eagle back to Catalina began in 1980, nine years after it was listed as an endangered species in California.

Though he has brought 33 eaglets to the island, and some of the birds have matured and laid eggs, the poisonous legacy has remained. The eagles have failed to reproduce without man’s help. All the eggs laid by island eagles with the exception of one have either cracked or, when placed in an incubator, failed to hatch due to high DDT levels.

On Catalina, bald eagles were abundant during the 19th Century. Years ago, visitors there saw numerous nests on cliffs where the birds were inaccessible to people, said eagle expert Lloyd Kiff, acting curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. The bird is believed to have disappeared from the island in the late 1950s.

Garcelon, who founded the Arcata-based Institute for Wildlife Studies in 1979 to save endangered birds of prey, said that when he first approached federal and state wildlife officials with his idea for reintroducing eagles to Catalina, he got a cool reception.

For one thing, the practice of importing baby eagles anywhere to re-establish the species was relatively new, he said. It had only been tried once before in New York, where it had been successful.

“There were a number of people who were skeptical of the whole idea of taking birds to an area where there were no role models,” Garcelon recalled.

The wildlife officials were also concerned about contamination from DDT, which during the ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s was discharged off the Los Angeles coastline through sewer outfalls. Tons of the pesticide were also dumped into the ocean about 10 miles from Catalina.

The pesticide, banned in 1972, affects calcium deposits in the eggs of eagles and other shore birds, causing thin shells and water loss. Eagles, feeding on fish, gulls and other animals also exposed to the pesticide, store DDT in their fatty tissue.

Nevertheless, the officials decided to give Garcelon the go ahead, in part because DDT contamination in shellfish around the Channel Islands had decreased, and the brown pelican, another bird affected by DDT contamination, had started to make a comeback.

“Indications were we had an improving situation,” said Phil Detrich, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Sacramento.

Garcelon started the Catalina project by bringing six baby eagles from Washington state to the island. Three platforms big enough to house three eagles each were built in remote parts of the island. On each platform, a nest was constructed out of sticks.

Over the years, more eaglets were brought to the island. Out of a total of 33, 13 still live there. The others either flew away or died. A mated pair of the “renaissance eagles” first built a nest in 1984, and eagles now occupy nests on the east and west ends of the island.

But the eagles have had problems producing viable eggs. One of the birds laid an egg in 1987, but it broke during brooding. The egg’s shell was believed to have been thinned by DDT contamination.

A subsequent egg was also broken by an eagle. So Garcelon began removing the eggs from the nests in 1989 and taking them to an incubator at the Predatory Bird Research Group at UC Santa Cruz. Eggs taken from the nest were replaced with artificial ones.

On June 17, an eaglet born from an egg laid this spring by one of the island’s eagles and hatched in an incubator at UC Santa Cruz was brought back to the island. The 7-week-old eagle--Spence--was placed in a nest atop a 20-foot platform overlooking the ocean. Squirrel, fish and other meat will be left in the nest for the bird until it can hunt on its own.

But Spence, named after a man who has donated time and equipment to Garcelon’s efforts, has been the exception to the rule. The other six eggs laid on the island and placed in the incubator were too contaminated with DDT to hatch, Garcelon said. One egg had a DDT contamination level of 20 parts per million.

“It was so high, (researchers) had to recheck it to make sure they weren’t wrong,” said Brian Walton, coordinator of the bird research group.

Roger Helm, an ecologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the bald eagle appears to be more sensitive to DDT contamination than other birds such as the peregrine falcon. While a level of 15 p.p.m. appears to cause reproductive failure in falcons, a level of 5 p.p.m. affects eagles’ ability to produce eggs with shells that are thick enough.

“Basically what you have is the . . . yolk loses water and you have dehydration,” Helm said.

Despite the difficulty Garcelon’s eagles have laying viable eggs, state and federal officials say they applaud Garcelon’s efforts and do not believe that he should curtail his project. They point to the success Garcelon had earlier this year when two eagle eggs were brought in from Northern California, placed in island nests and successfully hatched by adults.

“It’s really one of the leading restoration efforts involving an endangered species on the whole West Coast,” Detrich said. “After all this work and money, he has established a base population of growth. Those birds could potentially be breeding there for 15 or 20 years.”

“Right now, the feeling is we got so much invested over there that it is easier to maintain it than go back and start over,” he added. “The feeling is the situation will improve.” Garcelon, whose institute is also involved in a study of the threatened Channel Island fox, said that while he is frustrated, the project has shown eagles can be brought to he island, grow into adults, mate and lay eggs.

Garcelon also believes that the eggs laid by the island’s eagles document the level of pesticide pollution that still exists on and around Catalina. He has shared data from his project with federal attorneys who are attempting to bring suit against eight companies and the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

The government has charged the companies and districts with the ocean disposal of hundreds of tons of pesticide DDT and PCBs. Last April, a federal district judge dismissed the government’s claim, saying it failed to detail the environmental damage done by the DDT and PCB pollutants. The next court hearing is set for July 15.

Over the years, Garcelon said, he has received almost $400,000 in funding from the state and county, as well as the Santa Catalina Conservancy, which owns 86% of the island.

But money is now scarce, and he has had to cut back on help hired to monitor the eagle nests and care for the young birds. Once he had four people working for him. Now there is only one.

Even though he expects the project to wind up $10,000 in the red this year, Garcelon said he will find a way to continue. He said he spends the equivalent of four months a year working with the eagles and has not paid himself a salary for three years.

Garcelon’s enthusiasm for the project and expectations for his eagles appear unflagging. Last week, he was back on Catalina to observe a nest on the island’s eastern end. He huddled in a pup tent that is used as a blind. A telescope placed in the tent is aimed at the nest several hundred yards away.

“The eagles are doing everything right, except hatching the eggs,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s just going to take a little hand holding.”

The Bald Eagle Scientific name: Haliaeetus leucocephalus

Habits: During the breeding season, the bald eagle stays close to large bodies of water where it catches fish for food. Large stick nests are usually built in tree canopies, but in areas where trees are scarce, the nests are placed on ridges and cliffs. In recent decades, the bald eagle population has been seriously reduced by pesticides, but the species is making a moderate comeback. There are about 50,000 bald eagles in the United States, mostly in Alaska.

Description: 30-43 inches long with wingspan of about seven feet. Adults are light- to chocolate-brown, with a white head and tail. Juveniles range from brownish-black to light mottled tan, with white spotting on wing linings and flight feathers.

Range: Formerly found throughout North American north of Mexico. Still abundant in Alaska and Canada south of tree line, Washington, Oregon, northern Idaho, Great Lakes states, Maine, Chesapeake Bay, California, Arizona and Florida. In Northern California, there are an estimated 100 pairs of eagles, up from 23 in the ear-

ly 1970s, but in Southern California,

where the eagle is thought to have disappeared from the mainland by the turn of this century, the bird is still a rare sight. There are only two known nesting sites on the Southern California mainland, one in Santa Barbara County and the other in San Bernardino County. Neither of those nests have produced a baby eagle this year.