Eyes on eagles: Expo shows off Morgan City, too

“Eagle-eyed” turns out to have two meanings. Not only do eagles have legendary vision, but you have to look sharp to find them, too.
As Cajun Jack piloted a tour boat full of eagle-watchers away from the Russo Boat Landing on Saturday, a dozen sets of human eyes began to scan the trees along the canal for the tell-tale white head feathers of our national symbol.
Bald eagles aren’t really bald, of course, but their young don’t even look bald. They don’t get white head feathers until they’re mature. As juveniles, they’re a sort of streaky, dull brown that blends in too well with the green and gray of the trees.
Still, a young voice soon sang out what a pair of young eyes spotted: “There’s a juvenile!” The zoom lenses rose in unison. The shutters clattered and whirred. And the people in the boat saw what they came to Eagle Expo 2015 for: maybe a dozen eagles in two hours, mature as well as juvenile, plus gulls, pelicans, egrets and cypress swamp scenes.
The 10th annual Eagle Expo re-introduced participants to the bald eagle and the story of its resurrection from near extinction. The expo also introduces people from all over the country to Morgan City.
People from as far away as California and New York attended this year’s event, said Carrie Stansbury of the Cajun Coast Visitors and Convention Bureau.
More than 100 people attended the event. Some came for the boat tours of the Atchafalaya Basin, Bayou Long, Bayou Black and Turtle Bayou. Others came for a photography workshop with C.C. Lockwood, seminars on eagles, an Al Batt presentation on bird-watching, and a presentation complete with live birds by Extreme Raptors.
“It exceeded our expectations this year,” Stansbury said. “This is the biggest thing our office organizes entirely. We had lots of compliments and enjoyed the day. Of course, the weather helped, being so beautiful. It didn’t hurt that they saw lots of eagles.”
Promotional material describes the expo as a tribute to the resurgence of bald eagles. As beautiful as the sight of a bald eagle lording it over its territory can be, the story of its comeback is even more compelling.
Michael Sealy of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries told that story Saturday morning at Morgan City’s Holiday Inn.
The bald eagle’s vast range may have a population as large as 100,000 breeding pairs before the mid-19th century, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. But by the early 1960s, the species may have been down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs, including six or eight pairs in Louisiana.
Habitat loss is partly responsible, but not in Louisiana, where, Sealy said, plenty of habitat remained.
Here and elsewhere, eagles were hunted because farmers and sportsmen feared that eagles would kill livestock or compete for game. Bald eagles were killed for their feathers. The U.S. government actually paid a bounty of 50 cents to $2 per eagle killed from 1917 until the 1950s.
In 1940, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act, which offered some safeguards. But not long after World War II, the pesticide DDT came along, entering the food chain and interfering with the reproductive cycles of eagles and other birds.
By the mid-1960s, developments finally began to go the eagle’s way. In 1967, bald eagles in the southern half of the lower 48 states were placed on the new endangered species list. The federal government effectively banned DDT in 1972.
Sealy said wildlife authorities began to monitor the environment for contaminants; protect habitat; enforce protective laws; and capture breeding pairs for reintroduction into what is hoped will be safe habitat.
The 1940 act was also interpreted to outlaw the disturbance of eagle nesting and not just physical harm to eagles themselves.
The results were dramatic. By 2006, the number of nesting pairs rose to 9,789 nationwide. Bald eagles were removed from the endangered species list. In Louisiana, the number of active eagle nests rose from 170 in 2000 to 387 in 2007, Sealy said. The number of young produced rose from 208 in 2000 to 530 in 2007.
Even so, there’s still some cause for concern. A 2015 count of Louisiana active nests showed a decline to 356. Sealy said an examination of the growing number of inactive nests found two uninjured but dead eagles in one nest; found horned owls living in a couple of nests; and found the shells of apple snails, an invasive species, in other nests.
“We don’t know what’s going on here,” Sealy said.
But Saturday, the eagle population seemed healthy enough, with plenty of birds, juvenile and mature, to be seen.
One of the watches, Melissa Landry of Ponchatoula, was on her third Eagle Expo tour.
“They are the most majestic creatures flying in the air,” Landry said. “I absolutely love them. I go crazy every time I see them in the air.”
She said photographing eagles requires a steady hand and a fast shutter speed. Blue sky and a long lens also help, Landry said.
“I’ve been doing photography for years so I just really like to come out and get pictures of them,” Landry said. “Doing this tour gets you as close as you can pretty much get to them. It’s a very cool thing.”

This story is by Daily Review Managing Editor Bill Decker. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.