it's a comeback decades in the making and a patriotic one too State Environmental leaders say they're confident they can remove the bald eagle one of our nation's lasting symbols from the endangered species list Ted Goldberg explains the two most important factors that led to the bald eagles Resurgence including a Little Help from our neighbors to the north bald eagles are really really important I think to the citizens of New Jersey when it comes to spotting bald eagles in the wild it's a game of luck not skill it also used to be much much harder we were down to a uh you know a single nesting pair uh through the 70s and 80s Kathy Clark is the chief of the endangered and non-game species program for the State Department of Environmental Protection she says bald eagles nearly went extinct in New Jersey because of a few factors the biggest one was the longtime use of a toxic chemical that wasn't banned Nationwide until 1972 DDT is uh is just one of those uh Insidious chemicals that is very long lived in the environment uh it was used um especially heavily in New Jersey and probably South Jersey uh to control mosquitoes DDT damaged the eagles's reproductive systems and is still frequently found in the wild every time they attempted to Nest they would uh the the eggshells would crack and the nest would fail wildlife biologist Larry Niles used to work for the DEP we would take one and there would be still two in the nest that area of Canada was unaffected by DDT so those birds were naturally productive it might be surprising to hear that an American symbol is booming back thanks to Canada the way state workers dealt with the Eagles was also a little unexpected I would climb the nest and uh take out the real eggs put in a fake egg so that the bird would keep incubating eventually the female died was replaced by a young female who was not contaminated Banning DDT and transplanting new Eagles helped and so did cutting back on development throughout the Garden State the land use regulatory program uh within the state uh developed really serious rules about protecting the habitat that that b Eagles were using using as we were identifying new Nest these efforts have led the DEP to request removing bald eagles from the states endangered species list 17 years after they left the federal list they would skip the threaten list too and join the list of Species of special concern these are species we need to keep an eye on uh because they could they could backslide hopefully we can do work like habitat management uh that will keep them uh on in the good space the DEP will try to finalize its lists later this year until then bald eagles will continue flying around tuao Wildlife Management Area free to Chow Down On Any Turtles unlucky enough to cross their path in Atlanta County I'm Ted Goldberg NJ Spotlight news [Music]