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| from video by Eric Fletcher, MIT |
"Oh, there's a bald eagle"
“Wait, what?”
“A bald eagle,” my daughter Lizzy repeated patiently, over
the phone.
I was walking along snowy forested trails near our home just
outside Fairbanks, Alaska. Four thousand miles away, Lizzy was walking, too --
along the Charles River, near MIT’s iconic dome, at the heart of a sprawling metropolis
of about five million people.
“I’ve seen eagles around here before,” she added. “There
might be a pair of them nesting on campus.”
“But…” I was still having trouble processing this.
I lived in Cambridge myself, from 1990 to 1995. I jogged
that busy waterside footpath from Harvard to MIT to Boston Harbor. I crossed those
bridges that connect the bustle of Cambridge to the high-rises of downtown
Boston. In the early 90’s, sighting a bald eagle at MIT was not just
improbable, it was ludicrous. But now my Alaskan teenager was nonchalantly
noting a wild predator with a seven-foot wingspan soaring over the Charles.
“Wait, what?” was a reasonable question. The answer requires
more words, but it’s a story worth telling. Or perhaps I should say two
stories: one about the birds, and one about the river. Both involve a little
historical context.
In the 1900s, America almost destroyed its national icon. Bald
eagles were hunted, then poisoned by DDT so that their eggs weren’t viable.
Their numbers dropped precipitously. By 1963, there were only an estimated 417
breeding pairs in all of the contiguous US; only Alaska (which became a state
in 1959) maintained a healthy population. For almost a century, there were not
only no bald eagles in Boston, but also none anywhere else in the state of
Massachusetts.
Eventually, public sentiment – about eagles, and about conservation
in general -- spurred a series of actions by the federal government. In 1940,
the Bald Eagle Protection Act made it illegal to kill Haliaeetus
leucocephalus. The passage of the Endangered Species Preservation Act in
1967 and then the Endangered Species Act in 1973 allowed bald eagles to be
listed and further protected. In 1972, thanks to diligent scientific research and
years of public outrage, DDT was banned.
Even with protections in place, so few bald eagles remained
that populations couldn’t recover. Active restoration and reintroduction were
needed. In 1982, MassWildlife and US Fish and Wildlife experts worked together
to relocate 41 young birds from Michigan and Canada to the Quabbin Reservoir in
central MA.
Eagles mature slowly, so it was 1989 by the time the first
successful pair raised their own chicks. But success accelerated thereafter. Bald
eagle numbers in the state have risen steadily, and young avian couples have
spread their wings to find suitable nesting grounds: tall trees near large fresh
or salt waterbodies where fish abound. About 90 nesting pairs were recorded in
Massachusetts last year.
Meanwhile, the river…
When I was a young adult in Cambridge, the Charles River was
a filthy sewage-laden embarrassment. I even worried about the drops of water
that splashed my hands when I ventured out to row with my dorm-mates. It was said
that anyone who fell in would become a mutant -- or outright dissolve. That was
a joke. The part about being advised to get a tetanus shot after a dunking? That was for real.
There were rumblings, back then, about cleanup. I heard,
when taking a class on environmental issues during my senior college year, that
a long-term effort was perhaps going to be undertaken to make the river “fishable
and swimmable”.
Fishing and swimming? It seemed far-fetched.
There were, apparently, a couple of hardy anadromous species
that sometimes managed to pass through Boston Harbor and into the Charles in
the early 90’s, but the river wasn’t exactly a thriving ecosystem. It suffered
from a dearth of any kind of wildlife, let alone the iconic American raptor. There
were precious few swaths of anything resembling natural vegetation. I saw occasional
ducks and gulls, perhaps, but even from the close vantage of a tiny wooden
boat, I don’t remember spotting a single fish.
What does it take to make a contaminated urban river fishable
and swimmable? As it turned out, it took
a legal challenge, a lot of science and engineering, a good chunk of federal
funding, and a huge amount of work and dedication.
Starting in 1995, the US EPA partnered with a host of local
governmental and non-governmental organizations to create the Clean Charles River Initiative. The initiative ultimately completed two major projects. It
built an ambitious water treatment plant, the Cottage Farm facility, to deal
with the overflows that regularly occur during storms. It also rebuilt a
hundred miles of illegal and faulty storm drain systems to prevent illicit
sewage discharge. In the past thirty years – one generation, from me to Lizzy
-- these measures have reduced the quantity of sewer overflow discharge flowing
into the Charles by an astonishing 99.5%.
So: the birds, the river.
I’ve visited Cambridge with my family many times over the
years. But our visits have been brief stop-ins during the winter, and have
largely focused on spending time with my sister and her family, and on doing “city
things” -- art shows, science museums, and restaurants. Last August, however, I spent ten days in Massachusetts,
dropping off first one daughter and then her twin at two different colleges. In
hopes of familiarizing Lizzy with her unnerving and overwhelmingly urban home-away-from
home, I took her for a walk along the Charles. I was looking for the tiny
sliver of green space I remembered.
I found more than I expected.
Hundreds of geese honked and waddled on the riverbanks,
unconcerned by joggers, energetic toddlers, and polite leashed dogs. The birds munched
not on garbage or moldy bread crusts, but on a variety of grasses and wetland
greens. They were joined by a wealth of other waterfowl, including massive
dignified swans. And then, as Lizzy and I made our way from MIT along the slow
curve upriver toward Harvard, we found ourselves in a spacious park. I halted
in confusion. “This… wasn’t here before,” I said.
Magazine Beach park is a 17-acre haven of mixed-species
lawns, shade trees, and healthy tangles of waterside reeds and grasses. A small
visitors’ center offered us not only a bathroom and a place to fill our water
bottles, but also some excellent displays chronicling the cleanup of the
watershed and ongoing environmental efforts.
The Charles River is now mostly swimmable, although there
are some days when it still doesn’t meet rigorous EPA standards. There are no
regular swimming facilities yet, but a couple of public swimming events and
races are held each year. It’s home to more than twenty different species of
fish. For human fishers, only catch-and-release is allowed.
Eagles, however, can eat their catch, should they choose to frequent
the banks and waters of the Charles. And, as witnessed by a nonchalant teenager
from Alaska*, the eagles apparently do so choose.
This year, now, 2025, there are bald eagles soaring over
Boston. They symbolize decades of environmental commitment, scientific research,
lawmaking, judicial oversight, targeted federal funding, engineering, restoration,
cleaning, volunteering, collaboration, grassroots community action, long-range
planning, genuine love, and boundless hope. In other words, they symbolize the
very best of America.
There are bald eagles soaring over Boston.
The birds, of course, have no idea what they symbolize.
But I hope America remembers.
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| From video by Eric Fletcher, MIT |
* And plenty of other people, including several news outlets and an MIT employee, Eric
Fletcher, who shared a video on Reddit.
