Eagles' Comeback Becomes Official

Since then, eagles have spread to all of the lower 48 states and the District, where volunteers first released transplanted chicks from Wisconsin in 1994. By 2000, there was a nest and an eaglet in a tree near St. Elizabeths Hospital -- the first breeding eagles in the capital in a half-century.

Along the Potomac River, officials say, the eagle population more than tripled from 2000 to 2006, from 60 to 192. Eagles are a common sight now at such places as Mason Neck State Park, set along an inlet of the Potomac in Lorton.

"There's an eagle there!" park employee Jodi Bucknam said yesterday morning. She was pointing to a brown-and-white form cruising over the water a few hundred yards away. Bucknam, who led tours of the park for three years, said she'd seen as many as 20 eagles at one time there, becoming so used to the sight that it was hard to remember how stunning it really was.

"It's old hat," she said. "It's hard to remember that they're cool -- that everybody else gets really excited about them -- because we've got tons."

The eagles' resurgence has been celebrated as evidence that, with enough money, effort and public support, a decimated U.S. species can be nursed back to life.

"It is absolute proof positive of how important and successful the Endangered Species Act is," said Kieran Suckling, policy director for the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity.

But Suckling and other experts said there was also a less rosy way to view the eagle's comeback. As of yesterday, only 20 species had been delisted because their populations had recovered. And many of them were large, familiar species like the eagle: peregrine falcons, American alligators, gray whales. The picture seems bleaker, Suckling said, for species that don't look as good on a poster.

"If you look at the species that come off the list, you know, whales, wolves, eagles," he said, "absolutely, what we call the 'charismatic megafauna' have a much better shot than the lowly snail or snail darter."