I became a conservationist in the shadow of my grandfather in the mid-1960s. I was about 4, holding his hand in his Swisshelm Park backyard, peering through the chain link fence off a bluff overlooking the dull orange Monongahela River.
“Stinks like rotten eggs, doesn’t it, Catbird?” he said. My father’s father was the only one who called me that, and at 4 years old I felt a special bond between us each time he said it. “If the river wasn’t that way we’d see all kinds of birds on that hillside, but oh fiddle-faddle.”
Our day hikes on the trails of Frick Park a few years later were more fruitful. An amateur photographer, he filled his backpack with camera gear, and I filled mine with field guides of North American birds, plants, trees, fungi and animal tracks. While he set up his camera and lights on tripods, my job was to identify the subject and describe its range and characteristics. Weeks later we’d bore the family with our outdoors slideshows.
But our most exciting wildlife adventures happened during camping trips. After setting up a home base at his pop-up trailer, we followed the footpaths weaving through state and private parks. Quietly, careful to avoid snapping sticks with each step, we’d walk and stop, walk and stop, slowly raising our binoculars when we caught a glimpse of a squirrel, songbird or white-tailed deer.
We were in Crawford County, exploring a brushy shoreline at Pymatuning Reservoir, when he pointed to the sky.
“Look, Catbird. It’s a bald eagle.”
I remember the size, so much larger than the birds I was familiar with, black feathers on a bulky frame and majestic white head. Almost defying gravity, without movement, it slowly circled near enough that I could make out its angry eyebrows and I wondered why it was so mad.
“It’s our national bird, the symbol of the United States. There used to be lots of them,” said Grandpa. “They mostly eat fish, and we’d probably see some at home if fish could live in that smelly water.”
Forty years later, Grandpa was long gone, but I thought of him and our Pymatuning eagle when a Pennsylvania game warden tipped me that a pair of bald eagles had been discovered nesting on private property above the Ohio River near Crescent. As a conservationist, I understood that since the mills and mines had closed and raw sewage no longer poured into Pittsburgh’s rivers, the water could now support insect life and a diversity of small fish. The fish had grown in size and numbers large enough to feed bald eagles in Allegheny County for the first time in about 100 years. Following a landmark statewide reintroduction program, the number of bald eagle nests in Pennsylvania had grown from three in 1983 to more than 100. Eagles had exceeded their conservation rating and were no longer considered endangered or threatened in the state.
In 2013, I reported even better news. A young bald eagle couple forcibly evicted two red-tailed hawks from their longtime nest in a tree rooted in a cliff face overlooking the Allegheny River in Harmar. Another pair had moved into the Pittsburgh community of Hays, nesting on a steep hillside overlooking the Monongahela River just a couple of miles downstream from the Swisshelm Park yard where I had taken my first steps as a conservationist. In recent years, additional bald eagles have set up shop near Glassport and in North Park.
With Game Commission consent, Audubon and the Monroeville company PixCams were first in the region to set up unobtrusive wildlife cameras that give anyone with an internet link high-resolution live-streaming video of the day-to-day lives of bald eagle families. Since 2014, the Hays site has been viewed by millions of eagle watchers worldwide.
“People across the country, and around the world, continue to get excited about the Hays bald eagle cam,” said Rachel Handel, spokeswoman for the Western Pennsylvania Audubon Society. “Watching the birds as they move from nest restorations through egg laying and raising young creates a bond between the viewers and the birds..”
Pennsylvania’s temperate longitude provides a year-round home for nonmigratory eagles. The Hays pair have been seen plucking pigeons off an ice-covered Monongahela River. The state is at the northern end of winter migration ranges for bald eagles that nest in Canada. Some 200 eagles winter at Delaware Water Gap in Monroe County. It is unknown why each spring hundreds of bald eagles gather in the skies over Tionesta Lake in Forest County.
“A few years ago, eagles in Pennsylvania were a novelty,” said Seth Mesoras, a Game Commission education officer. “Today, with 300 nesting pairs in the state -- more than that now -- it’s not surprising to see eagles. But people still love to see them. There’s something about them. It’s a special bird.”
As if inviting an audience, a bald eagle pair chased ospreys off their nest at Lake Wilhelm, Mercer County, and made a home across a wetland from the entrance to Goddard State Park. Eagles nests are now common up and down the Susquehanna River. The Lake Erie shoreline and Raystown Lake in Huntingdon County have become popular destinations for eagle watchers.
Throughout Pennsylvania, eagle tourism dollars are spent by hikers, bicyclists, paddlers and day trippers in areas surrounding easy-to-see nests and natural bald eagle gathering sites. On weekends in spring and summer, clusters of eagle watchers gather at Moraine State Park (Butler County), Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area (Lebanon, Lancaster), John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge (Philadelphia, Delaware), Glendale Lake in Prince Gallitzin State Park (Cambria) and many other eagle hot spots.
Bald eagles still soar over the shoreline at Pymatuning State Park, where my grandfather pointed upward and said, “Look, Catbird.”
