A week or so back, I beat the heat and humidity to take a short early-morning hike at Birdseye Hollow County Park, near Bradford. It was just a half-mile out and then the same back, on a blue spur from the main Finger Lakes Trail, which runs right nearby. Once I was back into the parking area I took a walk across the bridge and out onto the earthen dam, so I could have a look at the pond.

Birdseye Hollow likes to slyly dish out surprises. Our younger son spotted a fisher here once. And on one occasion as I was hiking close to the pond, I was suddenly enveloped by a burst of butterflies… and what could be better than being approved by butterflies?

On this morning, as I looked out over the pond, I watched a bald eagle circling overhead.

I never saw an osprey until I was a grown man, and I never saw an eagle until I was a father. Now I live in a place where both are annual nesters, and where they are, if not commonplace, at least a part of a typical spring and summer. Truth be told, I’ve seen them locally at EVERY time of year.

Why did their numbers crash? Shooting played a role, and so did habitat destruction.

But both of these very large raptors depend on fish for their diets, a fact that drove both of them almost to extinction. In the years after World War II we went on a DDT binge, insisting it didn’t harm humans (ha), and wouldn’t kill anything but bugs. We now describe it as a persistent broad-spectrum pesticide – it kills lots of stuff, and it doesn’t break down very well. It stays in the environment, where it keeps on killing, for a long, long time.

Over time it flowed downhill, collecting in the ponds and streams, where it contaminated the fish. The eagles ate the fish, and built it up in their systems. It thinned out their eggshells, so that only a tiny few survived to hatch.

Radically reducing use of DDT, and improving its handling, gave our national bird a chance to recover, and recover it has. You can watch one circling at Birdseye Hollow or Mossy Bank, along the Conhocton, Chemung, or Canisteo, and mention it at home as a pleasing anecdote. It’s not the once-in-a-lifetime experience… or the NEVER-in-a-lifetime experience… that it used to be. But it still lifts your spirit, maybe even the more so considering how close we came to losing them.

Back as recently as our nation’s bicentennial, the entire state of New York could locate only a single eagles’ nest… which failed every year because of the thin eggshells.

Scientists worked out a challenging approach called hacking. One of them would climb to the nest while the parents were absent, remove the doomed eggs, and substitute an artificial one. The parents would incubate for the normal period of time, after which the scientists made another climb, replacing the dummy egg with a chick from a captive-breeding program.

The delighted parents successfully raised the youngster, and did the same for the next two years. When the male died the female paired with one of the hacked youngsters; they returned to the nest, and raised hacked hatchlings for five more years, until a pair of the original fosterlings made the nest their own, and successfully nested on their own.

In the same period, eaglet cages were set up at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, where eagles had nested in the past, and where DDT was pretty much absent. Scientists hand-raised eaglets, working from a blind so that the birds didn’t become habituated to humans. The first two birds nested successfully near Watertown five years later, while others have returned to Montezuma to nest.

They like to be near fish, and in recent years have worked their way up our rivers from the south. Now our home is their home, and we’re neighbors with eagles.