Bald Eagle Scrambles to Escape Extinction : Raptors: Since 1974, with fewer than 1,600 nesting adults, the population has more than quadrupled.

There are days here when the wind blows fresh, the sky is blue and the light glints in glorious flashes off the chop in the Potomac River.

These are the days to envy Deborah Melvin, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service whose weekly duties include piloting a battered green skiff up and down the river in search of bald eagles.

It is agreeable work on days like this, and there is an added payoff: Year after year, the job gets easier.

“There’s one,” Melvin shouted excitedly one day recently from her perch at the wheel of the boat. She pointed skyward and shoreward, toward the horizon above sycamores and loblolly pines.

There, an eagle looped majestically in an upward spiral. The white head and tail caught the sun; the broad, serrated wings waved slowly in silhouette.

Another followed; the two were a nesting pair. Up and up they soared, almost out of view, until it seemed easy to believe that they could gaze out over the rooftops of Washington, D.C., 18 miles north, and watch over the Capitol of the land they were chosen to symbolize in 1782.

“It’s really kind of amazing,” Melvin observed. “Most people don’t realize we have this kind of wildlife so close to the nation’s capital.”

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It does seem remarkable, especially considering that eagles had all but vanished here 20 years ago. But the eagle is bouncing back, not just here, in the suburban shadow of the capital, but throughout most of the lower 48 states.

From the brink of extinction in 1974, when there were fewer than 1,600 adult nesting eagles counted in the continental United States, the eagle population has more than quadrupled. Today, the number of nesting adults exceeds 7,000. Young birds aren’t counted; if they were, the numbers would be far higher.

The revival has been so successful that the Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to announce soon that the bald eagle will be taken off the endangered species list.

The eagle would remain on the less-urgent threatened species list, but the “downlisting” would represent one of the greatest successes of the federal Endangered Species Act of 1973.

Or would it?

Most environmentalists and wildlife biologists agree that the 1973 ban on the pesticide DDT, not the Endangered Species Act, was the single most important step toward saving the eagle.

Studies in the 1960s showed that the pesticide caused birds to lay unusually thin and fragile eggs, which naturally reduced the number of successful hatchings. After the pesticide was banned, surveys showed the numbers of bald eagles and other raptors beginning to increase almost immediately.

Some opponents of the environmental movement go further and say the Endangered Species Act, which comes up for renewal in Congress this year, had virtually nothing to do with the eagle’s renaissance. They say the act should be scaled back--or scrapped altogether.

“The whole notion that the Endangered Species Act did that is just baloney,” insisted Ron Arnold, one of the founding fathers of the Wise Use Movement, an anti-environmentalist coalition.

The renaissance of the bald eagle, he said, “was because of the good will of just ordinary people, not because of some goody-two-shoes environmental organization.”

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Deborah Melvin wears heavy, mud-splattered boots, the better to navigate the late-winter muck at Mason Neck. She has ruddy cheeks, blond hair and the rugged gait of someone at home in the outdoors.

She agrees that private citizens have helped save the eagle. Every year, towns all over the country hold bald eagle festivals, raising money and awareness to help the birds survive. Private groups have set aside land; private landowners have spared nesting habitat.

She agrees, too, that the DDT ban was the critical turning point for the eagles.

Still, she argues, the eagle revival was nurtured by the Endangered Species Act and other cornerstones of environmental regulation such as the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act.

“If we didn’t have the protection of the habitat, I don’t think we’d have the comeback we see today,” she said. “Water quality, air quality--it all comes into play.”

The Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge was the first federal refuge created specifically to protect the bald eagle. It was established on Feb. 1, 1969, at the tip of a knobby peninsula along the Potomac’s murky journey to Chesapeake Bay.

Bald eagles had been protected, in one way or another, since 1940, when Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act, essentially outlawing hunting of eagles. Prior to that, “there is a lot of documentation of just outright slaughter,” said to Jody Millar, who coordinates bald eagle protection in the Midwest for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 1966, Congress passed the Endangered Species Preservation Act, the forerunner of the 1973 act. It listed the “Southern bald eagle,” a subspecies in the Southern United States that is no longer recognized as separate from Northern bald eagles.

Historically, bald eagles had flourished throughout the United States and Canada. (In Alaska, in fact, they remain abundant and have never been considered endangered.)

And although many Americans may have visions of the eagle swooping over a snowcapped peak, the fact is that the two greatest centers of bald eagle population in the continental U.S. were--and still are--Florida and the Chesapeake Bay region.

The Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge lies on the fringe of the Chesapeake, and is an important migratory stopover for birds cruising the Eastern Seaboard.

A survey in 1974, the earliest one available, turned up only one nesting pair of bald eagles at the refuge. Last year, there were 10, plus several dozen migratory birds that spent the winter or summer at Mason Neck.

“It’s an important area in that it supports both a wintering and a summering population,” said Mitchell Byrd, a professor emeritus of biology at the College of William and Mary.

By Deborah Melvin’s reckoning, the most important thing Mason Neck has done is simply exist. By setting aside about 2,300 acres of prime eagle habitat and protecting it from development, the Fish and Wildlife Service has given the eagles an oasis in the midst of fast-spreading suburban sprawl.

But the government’s role has not been entirely passive. “Everything we do here, we first consider the impact on the bald eagle,” Melvin said.

Acting under the authority of the Endangered Species Act, the federal agency has coordinated eagle management on adjoining and nearby state parks and a Colonial-era historic site.

Under Melvin’s guidance, the wildlife service has nurtured the gangly oaks, pines and sycamores that eagles use for their nests here. New trees have been planted; soil erosion has been checked.

Finally, and significantly, Melvin has worked with private landowners in the area to encourage them to respect and protect eagle habitat. “Obviously, the government can’t keep buying up land forever,” she said.

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Most landowners are cooperative; others are not. The latter are the natural constituency of the Wise Use Movement and groups like it that would put an end to the Endangered Species Act and its prohibitions on harming endangered species.

One such advocate, Troy Mader of the Wyoming-based Abundant Wildlife Society, insisted that private landowners should be allowed to do what they want with wildlife on their land.

“We say, hey, we’ve got to get out and manage these things,” Mader said. “We consider predators as part of the wildlife chain, although kind of like a weed in a garden--you don’t go out and wipe them out, but you have to control them.”

Mader went further, questioning whether the eagles had ever been endangered, and whether DDT actually harmed the birds. This argument has been made by others, including the late Washington state governor, Dixie Lee Ray.

Few, if any, reputable scientists agree. “It’s irrefutable, as far as the role DDT played,” said Byrd, the biologist who is considered one of the foremost experts on the bald eagle.

Although DDT is no longer a threat, Byrd is worried about the future of the eagle. He credits the Endangered Species Act with giving the eagle “an exalted status” and fears that the downlisting of the eagle, along with continuing encroachment on its habitat, will threaten the bird once more.

If that’s true, what’s the future of other, less-exalted creatures?

After all, this is the bald eagle, the bird that spreads its wings on every dollar bill, that stands before the President every time he speaks, that emblazons every U.S. passport.

Wildlife biologists wryly refer to such high-profile species as “charismatic megafauna.” Other such celebrities of the animal kingdom include the peregrine falcon, the whooping crane, the American alligator and the California condor--all of which the Endangered Species Act is credited with saving.

The federal government spends nearly $25 million a year to save the bald eagle, and lesser but still impressive amounts on the other “megafauna.”

“The plants and invertebrate species that nobody’s ever heard of . . . they don’t get any money at all,” complained Randall Snodgrass, director of wildlife policy for the National Audubon Society.

So far, according to Snodgrass, 34 species have quietly become extinct after being on the endangered species list.

Neither the government nor anyone else is likely to spend $25 million to save the likes of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the shortnose sturgeon or the Missouri bladderpod, all of which are on the endangered species list.

Some people would say it’s just as well. Americans have made it clear--and who could argue?--that the bald eagle is higher on their priority list than the hapless bladderpod (which is, incidentally, a plant in the mustard family).

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Off the Mason Neck peninsula, Deborah Melvin is guiding her boat through the river. A grand menagerie fills the cloudless sky.

Great blue herons flap by like gangly airborne sticks. Little mergansers zip frenetically over the water. Sea gulls cruise effortlessly above.

As the boat slips past a thin sheet of ice and into the mouth of a creek, Melvin and an intern, Collin Smith, spot a bald eagle sitting vulture-like at the spindly top of a tree.

As the boat gets closer, the eagle lifts off the branch and dives onto the water’s surface, grabs a fish--a shad or perch--and then drops it. It swoops up to another tree to contemplate the missed opportunity.

After a few minutes, it makes another try. This time, it comes up with the fish. Melvin cheers it on.

“God,” she says finally, “he’s gorgeous.”

The bird roosts on an overhanging branch for a minute. Then it lifts off and heads skyward.

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Three miles away, cars inch along in rush-hour traffic on I-95. The parking lots are full at the new strip malls along US 1, the Jefferson Davis Highway. Commuters are starting to come home to the ranch homes and condominiums that have sprouted like mushrooms all through these woods.

The bird keeps rising, higher and higher above creek and river and wooded hills. Its features recede until finally it is a black speck, no longer recognizable, no longer a thing of wonder. And then it is gone altogether, slipped out of sight.