HYATTSVILLE WIRE: You can now regularly spot bald eagles at the Bladensburg Waterfront Park.
Hyattsville birdwatcher Harry Yeide, a retired federal intelligence officer, has been going to the park every morning for the last six years and he said in a recent profile that he now sees them most mornings.
“When I started walking, seeing a bald eagle was rare,” he told the Washington Post.
Yeide now regularly spots three separate pairs of eagles — which he’s named Thelma and Louis, Karina and Notch, and Fred and Ginger — as well as great blue herons, snowy egrets, red-tailed hawks, cormorants, osprey and other birds.
The eagles are particularly fond of a tall radio tower near the park.
In the 1990s, there were no nesting eagles along the Anacostia River. A local environmental group called Earth Conservation Corps brought some eagle chicks from Wisconsin, raised them in an artificial nest and released them into the wild as adults.
Meanwhile, the Anacostia Watershed Society has also gotten photos of beavers and river otters returning to the Bladensburg waterfront amid a years-long effort to clean up the Anacostia River, while volunteers are looking to reintroduce mussels to clean the river.
