Bald eagles have returned to SoCal’s coastal habitat. How are the Channel Islands birds doing now?

Big Bear’s famous bald eagles — Jackie and Shadow — are often in the spotlight, but they’re not the only wild bird nests in Southern California starring in their own livestreams and capturing human attention.

There are dozens of bald eagles with more than 20 nests across the Channel Islands, clinging to cliffs and tree-like bushes from Santa Catalina to Santa Cruz off the coast of Ventura.

Among them are Jak and Audacity, the resident duo on Santa Cruz Island whose nest is featured in a livestream and followed by dedicated viewers.

“Before Jackie and Shadow, there was Jak and Audacity,” according to the Institute for Wildlife Studies. “Before Jak and Audacity was Chase and Cholyn.”

Several decades ago, there were no bald eagles left in Southern California, according to the institute.

But after years of work by the Northern California-based nonprofit, the population has returned to its historic coastal habitat and grown to an estimated 60 birds across five islands.

“Here's this great success story of nature coming back, and it's happening, you know, really close to one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world,” said Brian Hudgens, vice president of the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

Lay of the land

According to the institute, the Channel Islands eagle population is stable and could grow. As many as 25 eaglets fledge, or leave their respective nests, each year.

But challenges linger for Southern California’s only remaining coastal population of bald eagles. Some pairs continue to have failed nests.

Jak and Audacity have struggled to produce fledglings “not even half” of the years they've tried to breed in their Sauces Canyon territory, according to Hudgens.

Other Channel Islands nests successfully lay eggs and raise chicks almost every year.

“The challenges that they face is this variation from territory to territory and how good they are, and it's one of those things that we don't yet understand,” Hudgens said. “One of the reasons why we want to keep doing this is we're trying to figure out what's causing some birds to do really well, and other birds to not do as well.”

Bringing the birds back

Bald eagles used to be found on all eight Channel Islands, but the population dwindled and eventually disappeared by 1960, according to the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

The damage was driven by long-term exposure to high levels of DDT, a once-popular synthetic pesticide.

DDT and chemicals were dumped in the ocean basins off the coast of Los Angeles starting around the 1940s. Thousands of pounds may have been dumped until 1972, when new environmental regulations were passed by Congress, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

The U.S. banned DDT in 1972, largely because of its environmental effects and toxicity to wildlife. For bald eagles specifically, DDT poisoned the birds and caused egg shell thinning that resulted in many failed nesting attempts, according to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

That’s where the Institute for Wildlife Studies comes in. In 1980, the nonprofit took on its first project — reintroducing bald eagles to Catalina Island by relocating wild birds from Pacific Northwest nests.

The first eggs from those early breeding pairs were laid on Catalina Island in 1987, but they broke soon after.

“They had problems with their eggshells still being very thin because these birds are now feeding in the waters that are contaminated by DDT,” Hudgens said, adding that the eggs had some of the highest levels of DDT on record.

To help the reintroduced Catalina Island population, wildlife biologists removed the fragile eggs from eagles affected by DDT and replaced them with decoy eggs so the adults would continue to incubate.

The real eggs were then artificially incubated in special chambers, Hudgens said. The chicks that hatched were fostered back into nests on the island, as were chicks from wild eagles and those from the San Francisco Zoo’s Avian Conservation Center.

Peter Sharpe of the Institute for Wildlife Studies places a 2-week-old bald eagle chick in a nest on Catalina Island as part of the Bald Eagle Recovery Program via helicoptering to cliffs.

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Dozens more juvenile bald eagles were released to Channel Islands National Park, and by 2006, some of the birds started hatching eggs on their own. It marked the first known natural nest hatching on Santa Cruz Island since 1950, according to the institute.

“So we stopped going in and interfering because the idea is always to do as little as we need to,” Hudgens said. “Ever since then, they've been hatching well and [the] population has been growing quite steadily.”

SoCal’s ‘unique’ coastal habitat

The Channel Islands are now home to 60 bald eagles and nearly two dozen breeding pairs, according to 2022 estimates from the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

Institute for Wildlife Studies biologists work on banding a bald eagle on Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands National Park in July 2004.

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A biologist with the Institute for Wildlife Studies carries a juvenile bald eagle to a hack tower on Santa Cruz Island in 2005.

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Erin Weiner, the nonprofit’s eagle project lead, told LAist the islands’ largely undisturbed coastal habitat is "pretty unique," especially for California.

Rather than sticking to tall trees as seen in Big Bear or Alaska, a lot of the Catalina eagles nest on cliffs, using sticks to shield from the sheer drops, Weiner said. On Santa Rosa, some of the birds build their nests in bushes.

“On the islands, you get a lot of, like, gigantism,” Weiner said. “So, things that are bushy and small on the mainland become tree-like on islands, and so you have eagles nesting in these tree-like bushes.”

As part of the organization’s efforts to study the Channel Islands eagle population, Weiner hikes around all the known historic territories during breeding season to research the adults, eggs and chicks.

Trail cameras are set-up to keep track of the nests when humans aren’t around. Weiner occasionally has to repel down cliffs to maintain the equipment when the birds are no longer breeding.

There are also livestream cameras on a few nests through a partnership with Explore, featuring eagle pairs like Chase and Cholyn in Two Harbors or Andor and Cruz in Fraser Point.

Cruz was the first known chick to hatch naturally on the Channel Islands in decades, but Jak and Audacity in Sauces Canyon are probably the most famous pair right now, Hudgens said.

“I really appreciate the people who spend the time to watch those birds, and often they're telling us what's going on before we have any idea,” he said with a laugh.

The bald eagle population has spread to other islands in the area, including Santa Rosa and Anacapa. Some have flown as far as British Columbia, while others are setting up territories in places like Anaheim Hills in Orange County, Weiner said.

A bald eagle arrives with a fish to feed two chicks in north Orange County in 2023. The tag indicates it's part of the Institute for Wildlife Studies project to rebuild the bald eagle population on the Channel Islands, was hatched in 2013 at Santa Rosa Island and given the name La'i.

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