MCINTOSH – The orange paint is peeling on the window frames of the old citrus shop, its dark lobby empty of roadside revelers. A few feet away, a brightly colored sign advertises the shop’s upcoming restoration.
Orange Lake Overlook, as this 150 acre expanse is known, was a favorite stopping point for travelers along U.S. 441 before the citrus industry’s collapse forced its closure.
But while travelers came and went, an iconic, yellow-beaked species called the land home: the bald eagle.
With their eye-blurring diving speeds and mile-long vision, all bald eagles are impressive. But the ones at Orange Lake were remarkable. Eagles from this nesting site and dozens of others throughout North Central Florida supplied eggs for one of the most ambitious restoration projects in the 1980s, rebuilding the raptor’s ranks throughout the Southeast.
The Alachua Conservation Trust bought the land of Orange Lake Overlook with donor support, protecting it from development in perpetuity. In December, crews will unveil an 850-pound statue of a bald eagle, its nest and its eggs on the site, the epilogue to two conservation success stories.
A remarkable recovery
DDT, a “miracle insecticide” for controlling insect-borne diseases during World War II filled garage shelves in the 1940s through 1960s. It boosted yields of corn, cotton and soybeans but decimated bee and raptor populations.
As environmental writer Rachel Carson warned in Silent Spring, the bald eagle was among the chemical’s casualties.
Pesticide toxicity, habitat loss and even hunting by disgruntled farmers reduced the number of nesting pairs in the lower 48 to 417 in 1963.
The Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972 as institutions nationwide collaborated on programs to restore bald eagle populations. In the Northern states, wildlife biologists collected young eaglets from active nests, relocating them to areas where nesting populations had disappeared.
Researchers in north central Florida took a different approach.
Habitat loss wasn’t as great here and the region’s relatively pristine lakes and rivers offered the fish-hungry eagles plenty of prey.
That’s not to say the bald eagle population wasn’t affected,
“It was, but compared with other places in the larger South and in Florida, it was in fairly good shape,” said environmental historian Jack Davis, University of Florida professor and author of The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird.
To capitalize on the population’s relative stability without damaging it, researchers took eggs, not eaglets, from the birds’ nests.
UF scientists peered through binoculars to check for eggs from a single-engine plane flying over trees. Once they spotted a clutch, they sent a “tree jock” to shimmy up the trunk, collect the off-white ovals and stash them in incubators.
When the mother eagle noticed her eggs were gone, she laid another set, an evolutionary defense to ensure her bloodline continued if a predator broke into the nest.
Researchers transported the eggs to the Sutton Avian Research Center in Oklahoma, first in lap-held incubators in the back of an RV, then in a donated plane in successive years.
Cochin hens incubated the eggs at the center under staff’s careful eye.
“There were wildlife officials on hand with super glue at the ready,” Davis said. “If an egg cracked, they would glue it back together.”
The attention to detail paid off.
“Of 275 eggs that were culled from nests in North central Florida, the hatch rate was 100%,” Davis said of the eight-year program, which ran from 1984 to 1992.
Staff raised the young birds behind blinds so they didn’t learn to rely on humans for food. After eight weeks, they transported the eaglets to new homes throughout Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and other Southern states.
The birds spent about a month in what Davis described as “large lion cages on stilts”, learning their natural environment without the pressure to hunt for themselves quite yet.
Each raptor treated its new home as its birthplace, Davis said. “Bald eagles, when they reach breeding age around four to five years, will return to their natal territory with a mate or to find a mate and to build a nest.”
Once the eagles left their cages, they returned to the same spot year after year like loyal summer vacationers. “And that's how the other southern states became repopulated,” Davis said.
The bald eagle, the first animal on the federal Endangered Species List, was removed from it in 2007. The most recent numbers from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, from 2020, report 71,400 nesting pairs in the lower 48.
Getting in the bird’s brain
East End Eatery, a small neighborhood restaurant in Gainesville, was nearly empty as John and Susan Andrews strolled through its art-clad entryway.
Over a turkey club and coffee, the pair pointed out John’s welded creations that dot the area. Edward the Eagle stood with wings spread and talons flexed at a Reserve Soldiers memorial across the street while a Macaw (Mercedes in name and material) perched in a cage near the restaurant’s door.
The alliteration is intentional.
“I know he doesn't like it, but, whatever, I do,” Susan teased.
“It’s kind of gimmicky,” John responded, breaking into a smile.
Davis commissioned John Andrews, a commercial welder and metal artist, to create a new, not-yet-named statue to honor the eagles and eggs from North Central Florida that repopulated the South.
“Unlike many other eagle statues which are very dramatic with an eagle with its wings spread, either taking off or landing or carrying a fish, I wanted this particular statue to portray the domestic life of bald eagles because that's what this is all about,” Davis said.
Andrews immediately agreed.
He and Susan set off to Palatka to collect scrap metal, nearly half a ton of it. A surprise greeted them in the owner’s office.
“Eagle sculptures and eagle pictures, he’s an eagle fanatic,” Andrews said. “His office has a perimeter shelf all the way around the entire room and you couldn't fit another eagle sculpture up there. It was all fate.”
The pair returned to Gainesville loaded with every iteration of stainless steel: sheets, strainers, soup ladles, even part of a prosthetic hip. He shaped the statue’s base into a heart chakra and set to work on the branches.
“The shape… It actually came from a two and a half inch round stainless steel pipe that I cut in just six long strips,” he explained as he turned a shiny, silver example in his hands. He bent the metal while warm to create an irregular shape, then added bolts and scraps to create twigs.
Andrews designed the branches in dimensions a bald eagle could carry, then assembled the nest branch-by-branch, just as a raptor would.
“It's almost like, I don't know, you get in the bird's head kind of thing,” he said. “You know what is going to be right and what is going to be wrong.”
Andrews crafted more than 700 feathers out of scrap metal, burning each with a mixture of chemicals to create an eagle’s signature dark body without erodible paint.
He assembled them all in his backyard studio, hammering, cutting and welding the 850-pound tribute into shape.
Overlooking Orange Lake
Cicadas, dragonflies and cars whizzing by on U.S. 441 competed to drown out Tom Kay’s voice as he described the view at Orange Lake Overlook.
“We often say this is the most beautiful vista in all of Florida, you know, maybe all of inland Florida,” said Kay, Executive Director of the Alachua Conservation Trust.
The site, steps away from one of North Central Florida’s thoroughfares, slopes downward to its namesake lake at the border of Marion and Alachua counties. No high rises or utility towers break its horizon, only palms.
The community rallied behind Alachua Conservation Trust to buy a 71 acre tract of the property in 2019, preventing potential commercial and residential development. The Trust opened an 85- acre expansion towards McIntosh this spring and has its eye on a final acquisition to preserve the full vista.
“This project, probably more than anything we've done as an organization during my 12 years here, it just had tremendous public support,” Kay said.
Neighbors near and far remembered stopping at the orange shop on their way to visit grandparents or catch a football game in Gainesville. “Suddenly you’re like, ‘why are we getting a $3,000 check from New Jersey?’” Kay said through a grin. “People have sort of a certain nostalgia for the place.”
When Davis approached him about installing the bald eagle statue on the property, “I thought that it was the perfect place for it,” said Kay. Not only had the property donated bald eagle eggs to the restoration decades ago, it maintained an active nest.
Supporting the statue was “kind of a no-brainer” for Melissa Seixas, too, State President of Duke Energy Florida. Duke Energy donated $125,000 to Orange Lake Overlook’s expansion and $51,000 toward the bald eagle statue and signage at a nearby bird banding lab.
“I think this is a really great example of kind of a grassroots effort that has such a tie on a national scale,” Seixas said of North Central Florida’s role in the species’ restoration. “The eagle has such a place in American history and American lore.”
That role was formalized last year, when Congress officially named the bald eagle the national bird, a title some 200-plus years in the making.
Davis himself co-chaired the “National Bird Initiative” for the National Eagle Center and commissioned the sculpture to honor local bald eagles above and beyond their federal recognition.
“While I see all of the scientists involved in this restoration program as heroic,” Davis said, “I also see the eagles themselves as being the central heroes in this narrative.”
An unveiling ceremony is planned for 10 a.m. on Dec. 6 at Marjorie A. Hoy Memorial Park at Orange Lake Overlook.
