Martha Waldron denies this, but her hands and her husband’s ingenuity are two of the reasons bald eagles are healthy and thriving in Memphis.

In the late 1970s, more than a decade after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published, swearing the nation off the pesticide DDT, Waldron was among a small team of locals banding and renesting bald eagle fledglings in a secret cypress at Reelfoot Lake.

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“Then, 50 yards away we built what we called the people tree,” Waldron says, “where two or three of us would spend the day, getting up there before sunrise and staying until sunset, taking notes and photographing the eagles.

“The first couple of years, we monitored them very carefully. After that, we fed them every day, but we didn’t take extensive notes,” says Waldron, 81, getting ready to run out the door of her Memphis home to feed and water injured birds of prey, including a bald eagle, at the Mid-South Raptor Center.

That eagle and the three or four others Waldron estimates now live in Shelby County are the progeny of those renested babies, flown to Memphis International Airport — a pair or two each summer — as part of a national project to reintroduce the endangered bald eagle back into its natural habitats.

From 1979-1986, Waldron’s group banded 23 baby bald eagles, housing them for a night or two in the mews her husband, Jim, built in their Memphis back yard.

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“I was already rehabbing birds of prey, and I already had mews for nesting facilities for birds of prey,” she says matter-of-factly.

“My husband built a five-sided one we called the Pentagon for the bald eagles.”

The width had to be twice the size of the babies’ wingspans, which meant more than 15 feet to accommodate two fledglings.

The structure, shingled on top to protect the birds from weather, had a ceiling about 20 feet high.

“The pitched roof was above that,” Waldron says.

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“The bars were pine trees, three to four inches in diameter so the birds couldn’t get out. About waist-down, it was solid with shingles,” she said.

“It was very nice, really.”

James Waldron built it without a pattern for their shared pursuit.

Both are longtime members of the Memphis Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society.

Besides teaching school and raising her own children, Martha Waldron has banded some 9,000 to 10,000 birds, a passion that includes hundreds of peregrine falcons, American kestrels and Mississippi kites.

Each species delights her in a way that cascades in story after story, told with scientific terminology and detail, including the story of the kites, forced immigrants here from Kansas, when they began dive-bombing customers in local mall parking lots where their nests were situated high on lightposts.

But of course, they weren’t trying to scare customers, they were really just trying to catch insects, Waldron says.

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“A lot of people are seeing those now everywhere in Memphis and Shelby County, all the way the Tennessee River, because we get 35 or so every summer.”

But it’s the bald eagles getting noticed on social media and in loud whoops of excitement here.

Bald eagle spotted flying over Overton Park area
byu/el_niablo inmemphis

David Marshall, who lives on a deep, wooded lot off Central Avenue and South Reese Street, swears he had a fledgling bald eagle visiting in his back yard several years ago.

“He was the scrawniest-looking thing, sorta white with brown spots. His most outstanding features were his big, orange-yellow feet and knees and his oversize ‘Jimmy Durante’ beak,” Marshall says.

Marshall believes he is now seeing the baby as an adult, with a fully white-tipped tail and bald head, flying in the Poplar-Highland area, and in September while he was stopped at the traffic light at Poplar Avenue and South White Station Road. The sighting there created a stir in traffic.

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“The eagle was flying about 100 feet off the ground with two crows circling it.

“I’m looking up out the window and the lady in the car next to me rolls her window down and asks me what I’m looking at,” he said.

An instant later, she saw it, along with her passengers, he said.

“I never used to notice bald eagles so close to the city, but in the last couple of years, it’s not been uncommon for us to see one on either side of the I-240 loop.”

Julie Markham
Memphis Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society member

“At that point, other people stopped at the light see it too,” Marshall says, excitement catching in his voice.

Felicia Knightly, senior veterinarian at the Memphis Zoo, can easily confirm that reports of bald eagle sightings are up and that people, in fact, are actually seeing bald eagles.

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“Especially in Collierville and the outskirts when you get a little more east of the city,” she said.

Unfortunately, she has sad proof because the number of injured bald eagles is also up. Every time one is reported to the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency, Knightly gets a call about where the bird is and when it can be delivered to the hospital at the zoo.

There are three bald eagles now under her care besides the three in the zoo’s collection.

“Two of them are gunshot victims. That makes me very sad and very frustrated,” Knightly said.

“This is our national symbol. They look nothing like a duck. I’m not against hunting but I am against irresponsible hunting.”

People who hunt, she says, have the responsibility to know what they are shooting.

She’s also seeing eagles shot with lead pellets.

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“It’s not just if they survive the gunshot, then I have to get the pellet out because otherwise long-term, you may be looking at lead toxicity. It’s not just the initial insult, but also what happens after,” she said.

Eagles are no longer on the endangered species list, but they are protected by the federal Eagle Act.

The success of the re-emergence in Shelby County is directly connected to what Waldron and other volunteers, including Sue Ferguson, did in the 1970s and ‘80s, Knightly says.

They “scrunched” the massive birds who, even as fledglings had nearly their adult wingspan, into pet carriers and headed to Reelfoot where the birds were carefully put in nests and hand-fed. 

In the 1980s, Waldron knew of two bald eagle nests in the region. The number now could be as high as five, she said.

“There’s one somewhere along the Wolf River, but I don’t know where. I’ve canoed it. We’ve asked others who canoe to look for it. We haven’t been able to locate it, but I suspect it is somewhere in Fayette or Hardeman County,” she said.

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She knows where nests are in Memphis and on the Loosahatchie River in Fayette County.

“They’ll go many miles to find food just because they can fly very quickly,” she said.

But she takes no credit for the comeback, noting the effort to renest the babies was the work of Bob Hatcher, TWRA’s non-game biologist at the time.

“He took it upon himself to try to improve that situation along with a couple of other species, the kestrel and the peregrine falcon,” Waldron said.

The volunteers provided the manpower to carry out the work, including keeping meticulous records of the banding and then of the sightings when the released birds began showing up as far away as North Dakota.

Volunteers around the country carried out the work with federal permits. 

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Julie Markham, also a member of the Memphis Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society, says everyone in the local birding community puts Waldron on the “short list” of people whose foresight and activism are responsible for the return of bald eagles.

“I never used to notice bald eagles so close to the city, but in the last couple of years, it’s not been uncommon for us to see one on either side of the I-240 loop on our way to Lausanne,” she said.

Knightly knows Waldron well through raptor rehabilitation work. She understands her reserve.

“It doesn’t have to do with one person. It has to do with the climate and by that, I don’t mean just the environment, but people’s attitudes. It takes a village …

“The dedication has to be for more than a weekend, right? It becomes a passion. And when it’s a passion, it’s never about you, it’s about a larger cause.”