2 eagle chicks hatch on Catalina

Santa Catalina Island is now home to two baby bald eagles, the first to successfully hatch there in more than 50 years without human help.

And scientists overseeing the hatchings, which occurred over the weekend, say another eagle nest a few miles away has two more eggs that could produce young within the next 10 days.

“It makes all the disappointment over the years fall away,” said David Garcelon, founder of the Institute of Wildlife Studies, who began the bald eagle restoration effort on the island in 1980. “I never thought this would be a 27-year effort.”

Catalina Island’s bald eagles hadn’t been able to produce chicks on their own because the pesticide DDT had built up in their bodies and thinned their eggs. A large deposit of the pesticide, banned in the United States in 1972, remains on the ocean floor off Palos Verdes Peninsula and continues to seep into fish and other marine life.

The female eagle that produced the two eggs that hatched Saturday and Sunday is 8 years old, the youngest breeding female on the island. She was hatched at the San Francisco Zoo. The father is a 21-year-old bird, originally from British Columbia, that has been on Catalina since 1986.

Since 1980, more than 100 eagles have been released or fostered into nests on Catalina in an effort to restore the island’s population, which disappeared in the 1960s. But until now, eagle eggs wouldn’t hatch there unless scientists removed them and put them in incubators.

Peter Sharpe, bald eagle program manager at the wildlife studies institute, said scientists decided to leave eggs in two nests on Catalina this year to see if the eagles could hatch them because DDT levels in eggs have been declining, and last year two chicks hatched on nearby Santa Cruz Island. They were the first chicks produced unaided anywhere on the eight Channel Islands since the project began.

Ann Muscat, president and chief executive of the Catalina Island Conservancy, which oversees most of the island, said this weekend’s hatchings offer hope for the future of bald eagles.

Funding for the eagle restoration project has been cut in recent years.

Since 1991, the project has been funded from a $140-million settlement paid by Montrose Chemical Co. -- which manufactured DDT in a plant near Torrance -- other chemical companies and about 100 municipalities. But the council of state and federal agencies overseeing the money decided in late 2005 to shift most of its ecological restoration funds from Catalina to the northern Channel Islands, including Santa Cruz.

marla.cone@latimes.com

greg.griggs@latimes.com