Along the Hudson River, the Bald Eagle Has Landed

Darryl Wong is worried that he has come at the wrong time for the bald eagles.

“Supposedly midday they’re resting,” he tells his cousin Robert Tsai, who is scanning the trees with binoculars. Wong has a camera with a lens almost as big as one of the great birds, “but it’s not big enough,” he says, “if they don’t show.”

Even more frustrating, another group is making its way out of Croton Point Park gloating. A dozen hikers from the Westchester Trails Assn. can’t stop talking about the midair spectacle they just witnessed high above a camping area.

“Two of them, chasing each other and doing loops,” reports Barry Kaplan, a White Plains, N.Y., lawyer.

“A couple of years ago, we saw a dozen on ice floes, fishing,” says Marsha Cohen from Hastings, 20 minutes downriver. “But that was nothing like the courtship dance we saw today.”

Kaplan says: “I had put this on my list of things to do in retirement: ‘See American bald eagles.’ I’m not retired, and now I’ve seen them.”

Wong, an information technology consultant who lives in New Jersey, has seen them too. In fact, he saw 30 this winter on a trip along the Delaware River in the Pocono Mountains. But the eagles were nowhere in sight when he and his cousin arrived about noon at Croton Point Park, a 508-acre peninsula that juts into the Hudson River about 30 miles north of Manhattan.

“They like the evergreens,” he says. “You’ve just gotta look for the egg shape sitting on top of the tree. And the white head.

“If they’re sitting on a tree and you get an angle, it’s worth it,” Wong says, standing near a cluster of four English yews that, according to a historical marker, a settler purchased for 37.5 cents each in the mid-1800s.

The sky is getting gray, and the forecast is not good.

“You may see one or two, but I’m not expecting a whole bunch,” the amateur photographer says. “If it starts snowing, I’m outta here.”

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Forty years ago, the American bald eagle was near extinction. Extensive use of DDT and other pesticides, lead poisoning and loss of habitat had taken a heavy toll: There were only about 400 known nesting pairs in the lower 48 states.

A cleaner environment and protective measures have dramatically changed the bird’s prospects: There are now more than 7,000 known nesting pairs in the contiguous states, and the bald eagle is close to being delisted as an endangered species.

In 1997, naturalists in the lower Hudson Valley spotted the first eaglet from a nesting pair in a century; by 2000, 10 newborns were sighted.

Today, eagles and eagle watchers are abundant here on winter weekends. Scores of the birds come south to nest in trees along the Hudson from suburban Westchester County up to West Point.

“These are the wintering birds from Canada -- they think this is the warm spot,” says Tedor Whitman, a naturalist at the nearby Teatown Lake Reservation wilderness area, who helped organize the second annual EagleFest. Sunday’s event was designed to celebrate the comeback of the bald eagle -- and to give attendees a chance to glimpse the sky-dancing birds before they abandon their nests to go back north in March.

“This is a success story,” Whitman says. “It’s the national symbol and it’s representative of conservation efforts that have worked. This is really why we’re celebrating.”

The eagles come to the lower Hudson in winter because it’s usually one of the closest spots where the river is not iced over, thanks partly to power plants that warm the Hudson. The open water allows the birds to fish; railroad tracks provide food in the form of carcasses of animals struck by trains.

But this winter has been particularly mild, so there’s not much ice at all, even farther north. Bird sightings are down slightly from last year, when 50 to 80 were counted, Whitman said.

Jonathan Kruk, a professional storyteller from Garrison, N.Y., knows eagle stories from various times and places.

“In all cultures that have them, the eagle is the symbol of hope and strength and pride,” Kruk says. “Around here in the Hudson Valley, we feel the same way, as if the eagle is drawn to this part of the country to get away from the harsher conditions north of here. The eagle does have a sanctuary here, so we have a sanctuary here.”

Among the tales the 50-year-old Kruk tells is one about Thunder Beings, mythical creatures that are tall as trees, with human heads and bird bodies.

“The Thunder Beings were having an argument until an eagle shrieked above them,” he says. “They were so startled they stopped their fighting and lightning throwing and hid under Niagara Falls. The eagle is the heroic one who stops them from burning up the land with lightning-like fires.”

Though bald eagles generally are found in undeveloped areas, Kruk encountered one at a friend’s house. “I was picking up my daughter from a play date and one fluttered on the edge of the porch. The other dad ran for his camera and it fluttered off into a nearby tree as if to say, ‘Watch, don’t photograph.’ ”

*

Just as Darryl Wong is ready to give up and take his camera back to New Jersey, a duck quacks loudly on the edge of the Hudson as if announcing, “Over here!”

And there they are: two majestic birds soaring upward from Croton Point Park, first playing a game of chase, one nudging at the other, then doing loops, then just gliding on the wind, their enormous wings outstretched -- almost certainly the same pair whose aerial show awed the hikers half an hour earlier.

Among those taking it in this time are Carolyn Blunding and her husband, Patrick Callum, from Putnam County, both computer people, avid hikers and by now veteran eagle watchers.

“See that dark mass in that tree,” Callum says, spotting another bald eagle in a bare tree next to a rolling hill that was a garbage dump before it was reclaimed as parkland. Callum offers a brief lecture on how to spot the older eagles by their yellow beaks.

“We came a couple of years ago saying, ‘We hope to see one,’ ” his wife says. “By the time we were done, it was” -- and she yawned -- “ ‘Oh well, another one.’ ”