Homing instinct

By the time I hired on to survey the common loon population of northern New Hampshire, back in 1978, bald eagles were long gone as a nesting species. Shot as predators, trapped for the taxidermy trade, left homeless as, one by one, their ancient nesting trees were sawed out from under them, and then poisoned inadvertently to the brink of extermination by insecticide, our national symbol had little reason to stick around. The last pair of bald eagles in New Hampshire had nested near the top of a huge old white pine tree near the western shore of Lake Umbagog. They laid their final clutch of eggs in 1949, then disappeared.

Years passed. Sometime in the late 1960s that last eagle nest, long-empty and derelict, tumbled out of its tree and crashed to the ground.

More years passed. Occasionally an eagle appeared near Lake Umbagog. Observations became more frequent. By 1981 I was spotting bald eagles during many of my surveys around the lakeshore, their white heads and tails glowing like spotlights against the dark alder and fir. Sometimes one would perch in the old "eagle tree."

In 1987 a raptor biologist working on Lake Umbagog observed a bald eagle with a yellow tag in its wing. The tag identified the bird as a male abducted in 1984 from a nest in Alaska and released in New York State as part of the eastern recovery effort. He seemed quite willing to resettle here: by 1988 he was seen regularly in the company of an adult female. That was the summer I heard voices from a tree.

I was in my canoe near the shoreline of a quiet backwater, more than a mile from the lake and the eagle tree, searching for the nest of a pair of loons I had been tracking all summer. Suddenly I heard the English language issuing forth from the top of a tall pine nearby. I paddled over to investigate. The tree became very quiet. After a few minutes, a human form descended the tree trunk. I observed that she was none too happy at being discovered.

Somewhat reluctantly she explained that a small team from the Audubon Society was constructing a nest replica to entice the new eagle pair. The tree seemed a safer site for a new eagle nest than the exposed top of a tree on the lakeside, where the team feared duck hunters might shoot the eagles, or (far more likely, I thought) bird-watchers might love them to distraction. Regardless, the initiative under way above us was an act of wildlife management, highly classified, and I was sworn to secrecy.

I never did find the loon nest, but late that summer we saw the eagles carrying sticks, and we knew something was happening. By the following spring they had finished installing a huge and ungainly pile of branches near the top of a tall white pine--not the tree that had been chosen for them, but the very same tree where the last active eagle nesters had made their home in 1949.

How did a young eagle, hatched a continent away and belonging to a species that had not nested in these parts in four decades, come to choose the eagle tree? We may never know the answer. It is enough for now to observe, in a time of population modeling and species management, that these patterns of resilience, of hope itself, are carried within the individual: a young eagle, an ancient pine, perhaps even a dutiful field biologist, kneeling in his canoe.

Jeff Fair has visited New Hampshire's Lake Umbagog every year since 1978 to count loons and listen for voices in the trees.

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