There is a steel mill in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, where a pair of bald eagles built a nest on the grounds of U.S. Steel’s Irvin Works. The nest overlooks the Monongahela River, surrounded by smokestacks and heavy equipment. The eagles raised chicks there in 2022 and again in 2024. Wildlife biologists were stunned. The birds were not.
This scene — America’s national symbol nesting comfortably in the shadow of heavy industry — is playing out across the country. And in Georgia, where the bald eagle’s recovery has been one of the great quiet conservation stories of the last half-century, the birds are increasingly appearing along industrial corridors, utility reservoirs, and managed landscapes that were never designed with wildlife in mind.
From Zero to Two Hundred
The numbers tell a story that most Georgians have never heard. In the 1970s, in the years immediately following the federal ban on DDT, there were no known successful bald eagle nests in the entire state of Georgia. Not one. The pesticide had devastated raptor populations nationwide, thinning eggshells to the point of reproductive collapse. By 1963, the lower 48 states held just 417 nesting pairs total.
Then the recovery began — slowly at first, then with gathering momentum. By 2000, Georgia had roughly 50 nesting pairs. The number crossed 100 in 2007, the same year the bald eagle was formally removed from the federal Endangered Species List. By 2015, the state surpassed 200 nest territories. The 2022 statewide survey documented 229 occupied territories and 227 fledged young.
The most recent data from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources confirms that the trend is holding. The 2024 survey, focused on the northern half of the state, recorded 145 nest territories with an 80 percent success rate. The 2025 survey, covering southern Georgia, found 176 occupied territories, 127 successful nests, and an estimated 190 fledged eaglets. The coastal population, which took a hit from highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2022, has rebounded to 59 successful nests and 83 fledged young.
Accounting for areas not surveyed in any given year, DNR scientists believe Georgia has maintained well over 200 nesting territories annually for more than a decade.
The Unexpected Neighborhoods
What makes this recovery remarkable is not just the numbers. It is where the birds are choosing to live.
Bald eagles are traditionally associated with remote wilderness — old-growth pines along undisturbed coastlines, vast reservoirs far from human development. And in Georgia, the core habitat remains exactly that: large bodies of water like Lakes Seminole, Oconee, Allatoona, and West Point, plus the major river corridors including the Chattahoochee and the Flint.
But increasingly, Georgia’s eagles are showing up in less pristine settings. Nesting pairs have been documented along the lower Chattahoochee River corridor in Fulton County, downstream of metropolitan Atlanta — territory that includes wastewater outfalls, road bridges, and industrial development. Lake Lanier, one of the most heavily used reservoirs in the Southeast, documented its first bald eagle nest in 2012. The birds now nest regularly around reservoirs that serve dual purposes as water supply infrastructure and recreation areas.
This pattern mirrors what is happening nationally. In Ohio, bald eagles have established nesting territories near the industrial heart of Cleveland. In Michigan, DTE Energy reports nesting pairs at the Fermi 2 Power Plant and Monroe Power Plant, with over 100 eagles counted near the Monroe shoreline. In Indiana, Duke Energy has repurposed inactive transmission towers as nesting platforms. At Oklahoma’s Horseshoe Lake Power Plant, OG&E has partnered with avian research centers to monitor a resident eagle pair.
The message from the birds is consistent: if the water is clean enough to support fish, and the trees are tall enough to hold a nest, the eagles will come — regardless of what humans have built next door.
Why This Matters Beyond the Eagles
A bald eagle nest is not just a nest. It is a verdict.
Bald eagles are apex predators that sit at the top of aquatic food chains. They eat fish. The fish eat smaller organisms. Those organisms live in the water. When a bald eagle successfully raises chicks in a given location, it is making an involuntary statement about the ecological health of that entire watershed. The water is clean enough to support a fish population large and healthy enough to feed a family of raptors that biomagnify every contaminant in the system.
This is precisely why DDT destroyed them. The pesticide did not kill eagles directly. It accumulated in fish, concentrated up the food chain, and expressed itself as eggshell thinning — a reproductive failure that nearly erased the species from the lower 48 states. The eagles were the canary in the coal mine, except the coal mine was every river and lake in America.
Their return to Georgia’s industrial corridors carries the same diagnostic weight. When eagles nest successfully near managed infrastructure — reservoirs, power plants, industrial waterways — it suggests that decades of environmental regulation are doing what they were designed to do. The Clean Water Act, enacted the same year DDT was banned, established the framework for controlling point-source pollution into navigable waters. The Endangered Species Act, passed a year later, gave teeth to habitat protection.
These are not abstract policy achievements. They are measured in eggshell thickness and fledgling survival rates.
The Role of Managed Landscapes
One of the underappreciated factors in Georgia’s eagle recovery is the role of managed landscapes — lands that are neither wilderness nor pavement, but something in between. Utility corridors. Reservoir buffer zones. Timber management areas. Even the undeveloped margins around industrial facilities.
Georgia’s reservoirs, many of which were built for flood control, water supply, or hydroelectric power, have created thousands of acres of shoreline habitat that did not exist a century ago. The eagles do not care that Lake Allatoona was built by the Army Corps of Engineers or that Lake Oconee generates electricity for Georgia Power. They care that the water holds fish and the pines hold nests.
Similarly, industrial buffer zones — the undeveloped land required around certain types of facilities — can function as de facto wildlife corridors. When a landfill or a power plant maintains a 500-foot vegetated buffer, that buffer becomes habitat. We have seen this pattern repeatedly in the waste management industry, where undisturbed acreage around operational sites becomes home to deer, turkey, and increasingly, raptors.
This is not an argument that industrial development is good for wildlife. It is an observation that thoughtful land management — maintaining buffers, protecting waterways, preserving mature trees — creates conditions where wildlife can coexist with human activity. The eagles are proving that the binary of “pristine wilderness versus industrial wasteland” is a false choice.
Threats That Remain
The recovery is real, but it is not invulnerable. Georgia still classifies the bald eagle as threatened under state law, and the species faces ongoing challenges that deserve honest accounting.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza hit Georgia’s coastal eagle population hard in 2022, reducing nest success rates significantly before the population rebounded. Lead poisoning remains a persistent threat — eagles that scavenge deer carcasses or gut piles can ingest lead ammunition fragments, with lethal consequences. Habitat loss from development continues to push nesting pairs into smaller and more marginal territories.
And then there is the emerging question of PFAS. As a fish-eating apex predator, the bald eagle sits at the top of the bioaccumulation chain for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, just as it did for DDT. Research into PFAS levels in eagle blood and eggs is still in early stages, but the parallels to the DDT crisis are impossible to ignore. We do not yet know what chronic PFAS exposure means for raptor reproduction, but the precautionary principle suggests we should be paying very close attention.
What the Eagles Are Telling Us
At the EPR Foundation, we spend much of our time examining the systems that govern how humans interact with the environment — the permits, the regulations, the enforcement actions, the chemical supply chains. It can be technical, abstract work. The eagles offer something different: a living, visible measure of whether any of it is working.
When a bald eagle fledges from a nest along the Chattahoochee River south of Atlanta, it is evidence that the Clean Water Act accomplished something real. When a pair builds a nest at a power plant on the Monongahela, it is evidence that environmental regulation and industrial activity can coexist. When Georgia’s DNR reports over 200 nesting territories for the eleventh consecutive year, it is evidence that sustained, science-based conservation policy works.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because people made specific policy decisions — banning DDT, passing the Endangered Species Act, enforcing the Clean Water Act — and then maintained those commitments for decades. The eagles are not a feel-good story. They are a proof of concept.
The question is whether we will apply the same patience and discipline to the next generation of environmental challenges. PFAS contamination, microplastic pollution, habitat fragmentation from development — these are problems that will not be solved in a single legislative session or a single news cycle. They require the same multigenerational commitment that brought the bald eagle back from 417 nesting pairs to over 71,000.
The birds are watching. And for now, at least, they are coming back.