A time of struggle ensued. In the 2018-19 season, two chicks were born, Cookie and Simba; the latter successfully fledged. (Names are chosen in consultation with local third graders.) In 2019-20, two eggs were laid but failed to hatch. In 2020-21, Jackie produced five eggs, again yielding no chicks. Observers were treated to the gruesome sight of ravens hacking open unattended eggs and devouring the contents. Finally, in the 2021-22 season, an eaglet named Spirit grew up before the eyes of a rapt audience and soared into the great wide open. What became of her is unknown. Several earlier chicks had been banded so that their subsequent movements could be tracked. Unfortunately, neither Stormy nor Simba lived much more than a year. Seventy or eighty per cent of eagles don’t make it to maturity. Spirit and more recent eaglets have been left unbanded, perhaps because the public is better off left in the dark.
Another hard winter followed in 2023-24, with repeated storms testing Jackie’s endurance. At one point, she hunched over her eggs for nearly sixty-two hours straight, with snow piled around her. (Shadow also spent a good amount of time incubating, but Jackie took the lead in inclement weather because female eagles are bigger and generate more warmth.) Still, no eggs hatched. The two most recent nesting seasons have been cheerier. Last summer, birds named Sunny and Gizmo took flight, and this year saw the fledging of Luna and Sandy—the latter named for Sandy Steers, the longtime executive director of F.O.B.B.V., who had died in February.
Eaglets are a joy to watch. Early on, they are little yellowish balls of buzz that can hardly stand upright and frequently tip over. Later, they become brown-feathered balloons, jostling against one another in their furious quest for food. As their eyesight sharpens, they become cognizant of their environment, their heads swivelling in tandem with their parents’. They test their wings—“wingercizing,” in Big Bear lingo—and take to hovering briefly in the air. How they decide they are ready to fly is a heart-catching mystery. Sometimes, it happens by accident. In June, Luna hopped clumsily from one branch to another, bumping Sandy off her perch and sending her to a branch below. After hanging upside down for several minutes, Sandy tumbled farther down and finally winged her way to a nearby tree. This is known as a “fludge.” Jackie, who had been monitoring the situation, later brought Sandy a fish as a reward.
For some years, a threat had been looming over the habitat, in the form of a long-planned residential-housing project called Moon Camp. This would have been less than a mile from the nesting pine and might have scared the eagles away. In July, F.O.B.B.V. announced that it raised enough money to protect the land in question. Just as this news broke, however, it became clear that something was wrong with Jackie. She vanished from the cameras for several days, then was seen struggling in the lake after a fight with two visiting eagles over fish. She was captured and brought to the Ojai Raptor Center, where she was found to be suffering from severe anemia. She received a CT scan and a blood donation from an eagle in Bakersfield. For a few days, she seemed to be on the mend, and was said to be quarrelling with her doctors. Then her health declined again, and she died on the night of August 9th. Some members of the eagle public went off the beam. The Ojai center was bombarded with intrusive calls, and conspiracy theorists accused the staff of manipulating information to secure donations.
Back in Big Bear Valley, the melodrama took another turn. A four-year-old banded eagle named KD1, also known as Kaydee, began perching in Shadow’s vicinity, as if trying to win his attention. On the day of Jackie’s death, Kaydee ventured into the nest. When Shadow stopped in a few days later, he made no attempt to chase the visitor away, as Jackie had done when he made his own move, in 2018. Did he sense that Jackie was gone? Soon enough, he and Kaydee were sharing branches and chortling back and forth. Kaydee appears to be female, and now of nesting age for the upcoming season. Her advent caused further consternation in eagledom. At first, she gave off a vampy, Lana Turner vibe. Some took to calling her Jolene, after the Dolly Parton song. In recent days, though, the tut-tutting has subsided. If the two do mate and remain at the nest, the eagle show will go on indefinitely, and all will be glad. Perhaps, as in E. M. Forster’s “Howards End,” the nest itself is the governing force, guiding destinies.
