A live view of the Two Harbors Bald Eagle nest on Santa Catalina Island, California. The nest is active from February through July.
 

In 1980, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Institute for Wildlife Studies (IWS), with the cooperation of the California Department of Fish and Game and the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy, initiated a program to reintroduce bald eagles to Catalina Island.

Between 1980 and 1986, 33 eagles were collected from wild nests and released from three different artificial nest or "hacking" platforms on Catalina Island (Garcelon 1988).

Once the birds were able to fly (at around 12 weeks of age) the doors were opened on the towers and the young eagles were free to explore the island. Many of these birds matured and formed breeding pairs on the island. The first eggs were laid in 1987, but unfortunately they broke soon after they were laid.


Concentrations of DDE (a metabolite of DDT) in the remains of eggs removed from failed nests implicated this contaminant as the causal agent of the lack of productivity (Garcelon et al. 1989), as DDE levels had been found to be inversely correlated with productivity in previous bald eagle studies (Wiemeyer et al. 1984).

During 1991-93, IWS studied food habits of the released eagles and documented high levels of DDE in the tissues of certain prey items commonly consumed by these eagles (Garcelon 1997, Garcelon et al. 1997a,b). Since 1989, the reintroduced population has been maintained through manipulations of eggs and chicks at each nest site and through additional hacking of birds.(Source)


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