The Audubon Society says it has observed 90 bald eagles in New Hampshire this winter. That’s the second year in a row that the count has documented a record number of the once-endangered birds in the Granite State..
When bird enthusiasts did the first winter count of Bald Eagles in New Hampshire in 1981, they saw fewer than ten. The population stayed low through the 1980s, but then began to rise.
“Our number of eagles that we’ve counted in each of these January counts has doubled about once every ten years,” says Audubon biologist Chris Martin, “So you go back ten years ago and we only counted in the mid-fifties, and you go back twenty years and we only counted about twenty-five.”
Bald-eagle populations bottomed out in the sixties, thanks to a combination of illegal hunting, habitat destruction, and of course, use of the infamous pesticide DDT.
In 2007 the bird was removed from the list of federally endangered species.
