Tune into a 24-7 livestream of an eagle's nest about 90 miles east of Los Angeles and it feels like you've been transported high up into the pine tree with the famous eagle couple who lives there, Jackie and Shadow.
On a recent morning, viewers had a nest-side seat as Shadow glided in with a fish that he'd caught in the shimmering blue lake about a mile away, to share with his eaglettes.
"It's almost like they know they're on a television show. They're putting on special skits all day long," said the late Sandy Steers, the livestream's creator, as she stood near the eagles' tree in January 2025 and marveled at their antics. Steers died about a year later in February.
Currently, an eagle believed to be Jackie is in the care of a wildlife rescue group for possible illness or injury after being discovered on the ground last Friday. But the long-term concern of a conservation group Steer's created, Friend of the Big Bear Valley, is to save the 63-acre patch of pine forest near this tree, that includes the last undeveloped stretch of Big Bear Lake. The project was recently approved by San Bernardino County's Board of Supervisors.
Friends of the Big Bear Valley, who run the streaming nest cam, say the development will harm Jackie and Shadow. Though, biologists who study eagles say it's more complicated.
Jackie and her eaglet in the nest overlooking Big Bear Lake.
Disagreement over mitigation measures
About twenty-five years ago, Steers created Friends of the Big Bear Valley to stop the lake's last empty shore from being developed. Since then, she started the eagle livestream that turned Jackie and Shadow into raptor royalty and helped spread the group's conservation message.
Friends of Big Bear Valley says the housing and marina project will create stressful noise and boat traffic at the eagles' only undisturbed fishing spot and mean trees they perch on while hunting are chopped down.
The developer and owner of the land, RCK Properties, declined an interview. Their project plans include protections for the eagles like a neighborhood eagle watch, limits on marina use and ongoing consultation with an arborist.
Steers said last September that those mitigation measures aren't enough. She says RCK's plan requires, "the homeowners association to police themselves and enforce the biological mitigation supposedly protecting bald eagles and the highly endangered plant species on this property."
Conserving habitat is key, say biologists
But several independent eagle experts say that it's not clear that the development would negatively affect Jackie and Shadow.
"It sounds like the mitigation that has been proposed, you know, it sounds reasonable," said Bill Bowerman, a professor at the University of Maryland College Park who, for decades, has studied how stressors affect wildlife populations, especially bald eagles.
Bowerman says measures like tree maintenance and closing the marina during the winter breeding season are what he'd do. In fact, he says he's authored similar conservation plans.
He doesn't worry about the boat activity disturbing the eagles much. "Most of the time they're fishing really early in the morning, and when people typically aren't there."
But, Bowerman and other experts are concerned about the impact this development could have on eagles who aren't already established in this area.
Peter Nye, a retired biologist from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, says development takes away habitat from eagles. Right now, the 63-acre development site in Big Bear is full of trees that eagles could nest in. "As long as that territory is maintained," he says, "that allows eagles to continue to perpetuate."
Last ditch effort
Friends of Big Bear Valley is engaged in one last ditch effort to save the land. Just before Sandy Steers died she negotiated a deal with RCK Properties to purchase the property for $10 million, if she could raise the money.
So far, they've raised about $4.5 million. The deadline is July 31.
