By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 28, 2007 11:28 AM

The federal government today removed the bald eagle from its list of threatened and endangered species, capping a 40-year comeback for the national icon that showed that disappearing creatures are not always lost.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made the announcement this morning before the dramatic backdrop of the Jefferson Memorial. Along with a crowd of dark-suited officials, those gathered to bear witness included boy scouts in uniform and a stately looking eagle with a snowy white crown. The decision offers a legal postscript to a rebound that has been obvious to bird-watchers across the country, especially along the eagle-rich Potomac River. There were 417 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the continental United States in 1967, after a decline blamed partly on the eggshell-thinning pesticide DDT. Forty years later, officials say, that number has grown to about 10,000 pairs.

"It's really one of the greatest conservation success stories in U.S. history," said Tony Iallonardo, a spokesman for the National Audubon Society.

Removing the bird from the roll of threatened species, a process referred to as "delisting," isn't likely to mean a new hunting season for bald eagles. Instead, the birds will probably enjoy most of the protections they do now under policies the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently outlined. Those include federal prohibitions on killing or wounding them and disturbing their nests.

That has pleased many environmental groups, who say they think the birds will continue to thrive. But the new rules have been criticized by the National Association of Home Builders, which has said they could prove too vague to guide contractors working near eagle nests.

And the rules seem likely to provoke a new lawsuit from Edmund Contoski, a Minnesota landowner who says his plans to build houses on a cul-de-sac have been held up by an eagle nest on the land. In 2005, Contoski filed suit to force the Fish and Wildlife Service to make a decision about whether to delist the bird. He won the case: A judge gave the government a deadline of tomorrow.

But Contoski said this week that he didn't sue just to have the same regulations put in place under a new name.

"They're taking all the value of my property . . . and paying me nothing," Contoski said in a telephone interview. He added: "I kind of expect we're going to have to have another lawsuit. And if we have to, we will."

One thing neither side disputes: The bald eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, no longer deserves to be on the same list as more than 560 other endangered and threatened U.S. animal species. The eagle's status, which began as "endangered" in 1967, was upgraded to "threatened" in 1995.

The bird's comeback is credited to a series of policy changes, beginning with a 1940 law that banned killing or wounding the birds. Before that, the national symbol had been hunted or poisoned in large numbers, often for bounties offered in state-sponsored programs aimed at reducing predators.

Soon, public perception of the birds began to shift, "from fear and loathing to respect and awe," said Jody Millar, who oversees national bald-eagle monitoring for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Other protections followed with the eagle's "endangered" status, including restrictions on building near their favored homes in tall trees along shorelines. And then, in 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT, a pesticide that accumulated up the food chain and hampered eagles' reproduction by making their eggshells fatally thin.

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."