Bald eagles fly over Bde Maka Ska and Como Lake on a daily basis, they wheel above metro freeways and perch in trees along the Mississippi River.
They're now almost an everyday sight, but just 30 years ago things were very different. As recently as the 1960s, almost no one saw a bald eagle anywhere in Minnesota (or elsewhere in the U.S.).
But once we humans put the brakes on things that threatened their survival, bald eagles came roaring back. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's recent estimate shows four times as many bald eagles as were reported 10 years ago in the continental United States, outside of Alaska. The agency reported more than 316,000 bald eagles last year, an astonishing number and a surprise to many.
That number includes something like 143,000 paired eagles raising youngsters and 174,000 unpaired eagles, either young birds or those that haven't found a mate.
(The federal agency used a combination of methods, from aerial surveys to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's sophisticated data modeling, to come up with its population estimate.)
Compare this with the early 1960s, when there were only 417 nesting pairs in the entire contiguous United States. There were so few eagles back then that it began to look as if we'd have to go to zoos and nature centers to see them in the future.
The 1972 ban on the pesticide DDT and decades of protections paved the way for today's eagle boom. The recent estimate shows real population growth, experts say, not merely improvement in data collection (it's not all that easy to count eagles across our vast country, so estimates are key).
John Moriarty goes up in a small helicopter (with a pilot) each spring to count eagles nesting along the Mississippi River from Dayton to Prescott, Wis., and his eyeball census found 49 occupied nests this spring. Moriarty, senior manager of wildlife for Three Rivers Park District, has seen steady growth in the 15 years he's been doing these aerial surveys, but knows that many eagles escape notice.
