For the last decade, a 24/7 livestream of an eagle’s nest in Big Bear has captivated people around the world. Its most famous occupants are Jackie and Shadow; their nest is in a pine tree near an empty stretch of lakeshore.
Plans to develop that lakeshore are underway, and the group that runs the live camera is racing to stop it because they say it’ll harm Jackie and Shadow. But biologists who study eagles say it's more complicated.
Watching the livestream feels like being transported to the eagles’ nest, on top of a 100-foot Jeffrey pine. Big Bear Lake, a nearly 3,000-acre reservoir, often shimmers a brilliant blue in the background of the nest.
Tens of thousands of people around the world have tuned in to watch Jackie, the female eagle, lay her eggs — and the same fans stay glued to the screen through late winter and spring, when the eggs hatch and the chicks grow up.
On an early July morning, Shadow, the male eagle, glided into the massive nest woven together by tree branches. Viewers bombarded the comments about how cute the eaglets, Sandy and Luna, are as Shadow shared the fish he nabbed from the lake.
The livestream’s creator, the late Sandy Steers, always marvelled about the eagles.
“It's almost like they know they're on a television show, and they're putting on special skits all day long. And it's hilarious,” she told KVCR in January 2025. Steers died in February.
The livestream is operated by the Friends of Big Bear Valley, a nonprofit conservation group which Steers helped found 25 years ago. Steers and a small group of Big Bear locals wanted to stop a luxury housing and marina project called Moon Camp on Big Bear Lake’s last undeveloped shoreline.
Friends of Big Bear Valley didn’t start the livestream until 2015. Since then, it’s helped spread the group’s conservation message.
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors approved the Moon Camp development project last September, but Friends of Big Bear Valley is still fighting it. They say it will create stressful noise and boat traffic at the eagles' only undisturbed fishing spot and cut down trees where they perch to hunt.
The developer and owner of the land, RCK Properties, declined an interview with KVCR. According to county documents, the project plans include protections for the eagles like a neighborhood eagle watch, limitations on using the marina, and ongoing consultation with an arborist.
Steers said last September that those mitigation measures aren’t enough.
“This [plan] includes mitigation measures that require highly skilled experts to perform, it includes planning, tracking, and keeping current on the fire evacuation requirements and procedures, the HOA is not qualified, nor are there any funds designated nor offered that have been granted to hire experts,” Steers said at the board of supervisors meeting, “requiring the homeowners association to police themselves and enforce the biological mitigation supposedly protecting bald eagles and the highly endangered plant species on this property.”
The board went on to approve the project at the same meeting.
‘It sounds reasonable’
Several independent eagle experts said it’s not clear that Jackie and Shadow would be negatively affected by this development.
“It sounds like the mitigation that has been proposed … it sounds reasonable,” said Bill Bowerman, an environmental scientist who studies eagles at the University of Maryland College Park.
He said individual eagle pairs vary, and it’s hard to know exactly how this famous pair would handle the development. But he said things like tree maintenance and closing the marina during the winter breeding season are what he’d recommend, and added that he’s authored similar conservation plans.
He said the boat activity probably won’t interfere much with the eagles’ ability to fish.
“Most of the time they’re fishing really early in the morning, and when people typically aren’t there,” said Bowerman.
Bowerman, who’s studied eagles for 40 years, said the raptor is more adaptable than early researchers believed. He said in Michigan, where he’s done much of his research, a fire wiped out the pine trees eagles were using and they adapted to cottonwood trees.
Experts agree eagles are more adaptable to human development than previously thought. Brian Watts with the Center for Conservation Biology said the conventional wisdom in the 1980s was that habitat protection for eagles was a strict trade-off with human development.
“We always thought that habitat management for eagles was a zero sum game. Either we give the land to eagles or we give it to people, but we couldn't give it to both,” Watts said. “Beginning [in the] 1990s at least, here in the Chesapeake Bay, and up to the present we found that that's not true.”
Watts, whose research focuses on the Chesapeake Bay, said the fastest growing eagle population there has been in highly developed residential areas.
“[In the Chesapeake Bay], we have nests that are directly over people's houses that regularly drop fish on their porch and on their roof, so we have found out over time that we can live together, " said Watts. “That has been a great realization, because it means that you know maybe we can protect eagles within urban areas if we provide the nest trees and other things that they need.”
But Bowerman and Watts, and other experts, aren’t giving this development their seals of approval. They said this could be detrimental to bald eagles who aren’t already established in this area.
Peter Nye, a retired biologist from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, said development takes away habitat from eagles. The area in Big Bear where the development is planned is full of trees that eagles could nest in.
Nye gave an example from his own conservation work: As part of a relocation effort, New York state released banded eagles at four places in the state. He said in 1989, one of those eagles ended up in New Hampshire, a state where there were no recorded nesting pairs since 1945.
“First nest in New Hampshire since 1945, almost 45 years. Where did they nest? They nested in the exact tree on an island in a lake in northern New Hampshire that was last occupied in 1945,” said Nye. “The nest was no longer anywhere to be seen, but they chose the exact same tree and nested in that tree.”
He said eagles will keep using territories indefinitely, as long as it remains intact. He said that’s why territories are “sacrosanct.”
“As long as that territory is maintained, that allows eagles to continue to perpetuate,” said Nye.
‘A grassroots effort’
Friends of Big Bear Valley maintain that the Moon Camp development would be detrimental to Jackie and Shadow. They’re engaged in one last ditch effort to save this land.
Just before Sandy Steers died, she negotiated a deal with RCK Properties to purchase the land for $10 million — if she could raise the money. So far, they’ve raised over $4 million, but the July 31 deadline is rapidly approaching. (There’s also a backup financing option that would require quarterly payments with interest, which Friends of Big Bear Valley said would be a financial burden for them.)
Jenny Voisard with Friends of Big Bear Valley said the group is scrambling to find the funds to meet the deadline.
“Our largest donation to date has been $77,000, so it's really been a grassroots effort,” said Voisard.
She said volunteers are doing marathon shifts to open letters stuffed with checks ranging from $10 to $1,000.
“I'm hoping that at the end of this we're going to come out all knowing that we did something to preserve a little space for Jackie and Shadow and wildlife beyond.”