Bald eagle remains endangered; America's national symbol was to have flown off the endangered species list, but the bird remains captive

When president Bill Clinton announced at a grand Fourth of July event in 1999 that the bald eagle was being removed from the endangered species list, critics called the announcement a political move to bolster the presidential campaign for vice president Al Gore. Three years later, however, the regal bird that the Founding Fathers adopted in 1782 as the national symbol remains listed.

"It is now quite clear that President Clinton's bald-eagle announcement was nothing more than a politically motivated photo opportunity--props and all," says Rep. George P. Radanovich (R-Calif.). "If the former president and federal agencies spent more time actually using sound science to protect and recover species, instead of politically charged hyperbole, we may actually see some positive results."

According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson, the holdup is over two other federal laws that also protect the eagle--the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Federal officials have been working on management guidelines and a five-year monitoring plan for the bird once it is delisted. But first, the proposal to delist the eagle must be published in the Federal Register and comments taken from the public before Fish and Wildlife Director Steven A. Williams and Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton can make a final determination of the bird's fate.

Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery is confident the eagle eventually will fly off the list. "The delay is a complicated process," Vickery says. "The Fish and Wildlife Service clearly believes they have met the recovery goals and it is ready to be delisted."
Radanovich calls the process "a bureaucratic nightmare, inefficient and ambiguous." He adds, "While it has become quite cosmopolitan for dysfunctional federal agencies to list species at alarming rates, it is no surprise that they have failed in recovering and delisting so-called endangered species."

R.J. Smith, executive director of the Center for Private Conservation, suspects a political reason behind the plodding system. "They hate to let things come off the list," Smith says, "because as long as the species is on that list they can control everything." Human activity and development in a quarter-mile radius of any eagle's nest is severely restricted, for example. "The best way to slow down development is to leave the eagle on the endangered species list as long as possible," Smith says.

Today, there are more than 6,000 pairs of breeding eagles in the United States. In 1963, only 417 nesting pairs were recorded. There are more than 1,200 species on the endangered species list, created when Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Since then, 32 species have been delisted, including seven once thought to be extinct.

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