Keeping your eyes out for eagles

by Jack Kintner

The salmon and the eagles were already ancient when the huge volcano that was our Mt. Baker’s predecessor was sending its own rivers to the sea. The only things left of it today are the Black Buttes on Baker’s southwest flank, relics of the thousands of unrecorded centuries the fish filled the rivers as they went to sea and returned upriver to spawn.

The rivers no longer throb with the sheer quantity of life as they did for millennia, something last seen by the earliest of the white prospectors and pioneers. They spoke of the incessant sound of salmon thrashing, packed bank to bank, squeezing through channels in water that gradually gets shallower and shallower, the noise of it all echoing off the hills all day and night in season as different runs of the five different sea-going salmon species worked their way to their various spawning grounds, past the resident cutthroat, rainbow, sturgeon and whitefish while all along the way countless bears ate their fill. Then, as now, eagles sat in the trees to welcome the salmon home for dinner.

Despite the reduced numbers, you can still watch these life cycles intersect in the North Fork of the Nooksack, in the Fraser and their tributaries. In fact, thanks to environmental restoration and some curbing of the greed with which cultures normally respond to natural abundance, parts of the cycle are thriving, notably the eagles.
One key environmental victory in 1973, banning the use of the insecticide DDT for domestic purposes, went a long way toward restoring eagle populations all over North America. DDT had been synthesized in commercial quantities by the Swiss industrial chemist Paul Müller just 33 years earlier, earning him the 1948 Nobel Prize in medicine for producing an insecticide that effectively wiped out malaria in many parts of the world by eliminating the insects that carried it.

The trouble was that due in part to somewhat reckless and uncontrolled over-use by an uninformed public; DDT came close to wiping out other desirable species, especially birds of prey, by compromising their ability to breed. In the early ’60s, the years DDT use reached its peak, there were less than 500 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the continental U.S.

Three decades after the ban, eagle counts showed a 10-fold increase. In August 1995, the eagle was downlisted from endangered to threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. Combined with efforts toward restoring healthy fish runs in area rivers, banning DDT has meant that you can again easily watch a bird in its wild habitat that once was rarely seen outside Alaska and northern B.C. Here are two good places to do that, one on each side of the border. Prime eagle watching begins in November and runs through early March. While birds are not always present at each site due to weather and other factors, they’re close enough that you can try more than one.
Where To Go In B.C.

To get to the general area from Vancouver, drive one-hour east on Highway Number 1 (Trans Canada) and take exit 92 at Abbotsford to get to Mission. From Mission, drive east on Highway Number 7 for about 20 minutes.

Chehalis River Hatchery
The Harrison River runs just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the south end of Harrison Lake into the Fraser River near Chilliwack, but it widens out to over a mile (2 km) in two places, one just upstream and the other just downstream from the Highway 7 bridge. Broad and shallow and filled with gravel, they’re prime salmon spawning habitat, and are home to as many as 2,000 eagles from November through March.

The Chehalis River flows into the upstream area, and has a hatchery where birds congregate. Turn left (north) onto Morris Valley Road (paved) at the Sasquatch Inn and the Hemlock Recreation Area sign just before Highway 7 crosses the Harrison. Follow Morris Valley Road for 6 kilometers to the Chehalis River Hatchery, where a short trail will bring you to the Chehalis River. Continue downstream along the bank. The hatchery itself is open from 8 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. every day.

Harrison Mills
The restored historic village of Harrison Mills sits on the lower of the two areas and has a public park on the river that provides good viewing. A kayak or canoe can often get you great looks at all kinds of wildlife, and the park has a good boat launch. The main channel runs close to shore but is easily negotiated, and once on the other side of it the current slows down, making it easy to explore. Return to Highway 7 and continue east across the bridge. Follow the signs to Harrison Mills, which is just south of the highway.

Where To Go In Washington:
Deming Homestead Eagle Park
Located at the original site of the village of Deming, the park is in a pleasant setting that provides several walking trails that wind and intersect through forested and open bottomland. It now belongs to the Whatcom Land Trust.

To get there, follow Truck Road (formerly the railroad right-of-way) as it turns south off the Mt. Baker Highway just east of the Highway 9 intersection and Milepost 15. The park lies along the road on the right side, marked by a small parking lot that provides access.
Mosquito Lake Road Bridges and North Fork Road Continue east on Truck Road about two miles to the Welcome fire station at the Mosquito Lake Road intersection. Park well out of the way of the station (and well off the road) and walk across the nearby bridge, the first of two on Mosquito Lake Road that cross branches of the Nooksack. Downstream from the bridge you can see a broad park-like area where the Nooksack’s Middle and North Forks join. One of the largest native villages in the area was once there, and was where early settlers could hire out a man and a canoe to travel up river.
Across the bridge the road forks. North Fork Road to the left has two good viewing sites with limited parking. Four miles farther on Mosquito Lake Road to the right brings you to the large iron bridge across the Middle Fork, which sometimes has very high concentrations of birds.

Return to the Mt. Baker Highway and turn right (east). There are two places, at mileposts 19.5 and 20.2, where tiny pullouts may provide room to park. Turn right on Hatchery Road at milepost 21 for additional viewing access at the Kendall Creek Hatchery.