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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.
