Canada Town Rallies Round Bald Eagle

The six people stood ankle deep in slushy snow while the temperature held just far enough above freezing to prevent the driving rain from turning to sleet. The air was permeated by the fragrance of rotting fish.

But nobody in the group would have chosen to be anywhere else at that moment.

One of nature’s great displays was presenting itself on the Cheakamus River before them. Dozens of bald eagles perched on the naked branches of cottonwoods along the riverbanks. Others swooped into the stream to tear at salmon carcasses. More wheeled and soared into the shifting mists overhead. Even an eye untutored in bird-watching and unaided by binoculars could count 93 eagles along a quarter-mile stretch of water.

Every winter, this British Columbia logging village and its surrounding valley host what scientists believe is the largest concentration of bald eagles in the world. The raptors come by the thousands from all over North America to feast on the crowded salmon runs of the Squamish River and its tributaries, including the Cheakamus, before returning to nesting grounds in the spring.

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For decades the gathering went largely unnoticed outside the Squamish River Valley. But as the eagles have multiplied in recent years--a record 3,769 were recorded in the annual one-day count in January 1994--so have the tourists. Now visitors from around the world arrive every winter in Brackendale, population 3,000 and an hour’s drive north of Vancouver.

According to locals, Americans seem particularly affected by the sight of this U.S. national symbol--a sight rare in the Lower 48 states, where there are an estimated 8,000 bald eagles.

“This man came in from Boston, and I took him up on the [river] bank. We saw 200 eagles. He wept. He wept openly,” said Thor Froslev, a Brackendale art gallery owner and civic activist.

The rise in tourism also has heightened awareness of the pressures on the eagle. Logging, the decline in some salmon species, creeping urbanization from nearby Vancouver and even the tourists themselves--busloads of whom have been known to heedlessly charge toward perched eagles, flushing them from the trees--pose varying degrees of threat.

In response, the people of Brackendale have rallied to the aid of their eagles.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada, which like its U.S. counterpart buys wilderness property for preservation, was recruited by local school principal Victor Elderton to fund an eagle reserve; 420 acres have been secured so far. Residents have set up a volunteer guide program to counsel tourists in eagle-watching etiquette.

Even the timber industry has rushed in. The Forest Alliance, a public relations arm of the big logging companies, contributed $2.22 million to the Nature Conservancy program.

In the process, Brackendale has become a laboratory for observation of the winter habits of the bald eagle and a symbol of the resiliency of the bird, which less than two years ago was removed from the U.S. endangered species list and reclassified as “threatened.”

Markus Merkens and Barry Booth, wildlife biologists working for the Nature Conservancy, are out on the rivers and streams of the Squamish Valley throughout the winter, recording the shifting locations and changing behavior patterns of Brackendale’s eagles.

It’s obvious that the eagles are drawn here by the annual salmon run, in which the fish come upstream to spawn and die. It is equally clear that the increased number of birds in recent years reflects the declining salmon population and the destruction of eagle habitat elsewhere along North America’s western coast.

But less is known about when and why the eagles move around the valley.

On a clear day early this month, Merkens and Booth rafted down the Cheakamus, propelled by a frigid wind at their backs. They spotted eagles by the dozen, including perhaps 30 circling overhead.

But the experts were disappointed and puzzled. In late December, they had counted nearly 1,500 eagles on this same section of river. Booth speculated that the strong wind that day may have forced the eagles into more protected streams away from the river.

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Despite the occasional hardship imposed by the Canadian winter--eagle season here runs from November through February--Merkens, a wildlife researcher for nearly 16 years, finds this project especially rewarding.

“It’s almost mystical,” he said. “You’ll be floating down the river and see 25 eagles in one tree . . . . The eagle is a pretty magnificent bird. It touches me somewhere that the other critters don’t.”

The eagles’ biggest promoter is Froslev, whose gallery-theater-cafe is headquarters for the annual count. He is a native of Denmark who immigrated to Canada in 1957 and moved to Brackendale in 1970. With his white beard and ponytail, denim jumpsuit and wooden clogs, he has always stood a little apart in an area that until recently was largely populated by lumber mill workers.

But he was the first to recognize the eagles’ tourism potential and one of the first to clamor for protective status for the birds.

The annual eagle count and related festivities drew more than 1,000 people Jan. 7 despite heavy rain and cold. The eagle census totaled 1,859. That was down from the two previous years, but it probably was depressed by difficult spotting conditions caused by weather.

With the eagle-preservation ethic embraced by nearly all the 14,000 people who live in the valley, the gravest threat to the birds may be regional--the recent decline in many of British Columbia’s salmon runs. This unexpected development has not been fully explained by scientists, although overfishing is suspected and the government is expected to sharply reduce the permitted catch this summer.

The bleached corpses of thousands of salmon along the Squamish River system, as well as the continued presence of so many eagles, suggest the shortage has not hit here. But it was not predicted elsewhere along the Canadian coast. Ultimately, the future of Brackendale’s eagles may be beyond the control of the people who live closest to them.