‘Awed by nature’: fans mourn California’s beloved Jackie the bald eagle, whose legacy soars on
Famous raptor helped livestream viewers in difficult moments, and inspired a conservation project at her lake home
The bald eagle Jackie made her home on the shore of southern California’s Big Bear Lake for most of her 14 years. But her death earlier this week drew international attention.
The Los Angeles Times described her as “arguably the world’s most famous bald eagle”. For years, millions of people tuned into a live stream of Jackie’s nest, watching her rearhereaglets, work out life with her mate, Shadow, and, perhaps most memorably, incubate her eggs while almost completely buried in snow.
She developed a huge following of devoted fans who tuned in day after day. And she became a pioneer of non-profit fundraising, showing the conservation movement a new path to reaching the broader public and connecting people directly with nature.
Following Jackie’s death on Monday, Friends of Big Bear Valley, the environmental education non-profit that manages the live stream, received thousands of comments and emails from people sharing what the eagle meant to them, said Jenny Voisard, the group’s media manager.
On social media fan pages, people swapped their favorite stories about Jackie and shared how watching her and Shadow helped them in their most difficult moments.
Trisha Dale Green, a local wildlife photographer who has been observing eagles for nearly two decades, runs a Facebook page sharing her photos of the raptors to about 177,000 followers. She closely documented Jackie, witnessing first-hand how unique she was, with her meticulous grooming.
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“These eagles have changed many people’s lives, including my own,” she said.
Gloria Ackman, a retired English teacher in southern Illinois, had occasionally tuned in for years. But after her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer in February 2025, the couple began watching constantly. The cameras offered a glimpse of another world, she said.
“These magnificent eagles face so many challenges. Yet they stayed focused on each other, on their eaglets and on survival,” Ackman said. “It was just so inspirational, their determination and resilience. I like to think that we embraced those qualities ourselves as we were dealing with the hardest thing we’ve ever had to.”
Jackie brought people together, Ackman said, and that will be her legacy.
“It doesn’t matter what your politics are, what your religion is, what your country is – you can look at these eagles and just be awed by nature,” she said.
People connected with the animals, said Beth Pratt, the regional executive director for the National Wildlife Federation and a conservation leader, as they did with the mountain lion P-22 and Flaco the owl.
“It reminds us of the wildness inside [us],” Pratt said. “There’s something about us that craves a connection to that. It does bring us really powerful meaning, to watch that play out.”
And like P-22 with the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, Jackie and Shadow inspired conservation efforts. Friends of Big Bear Valley raised $10m in funding this year, including a $5.5m donation from the OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, to permanently conserve land on the lake.
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The group fundraised for months to buy a 63-acre (25-hectare) plot of land, known as Moon Camp, that serves as a key ecological corridor and included the “last undisturbed shoreline” on the lake. The effort received more than 25,000 donations totaling almost $5m, as well as the Brockmans’ contribution.
“Jackie’s legacy is assured at this point. She really soared high for her kind,” Pratt said.
After the death of Ackman’s husband in December, she kept tuning into the live stream. She celebrated when Jackie and Shadow laid a second clutch after the first was eaten by ravens earlier this year. And, in Jackie’s absence, she has continued to watch Shadow carry on without his mate.
“Shadow is standing tall there on the pine, looking out over Big Bear, and seeing his big, beautiful world, and that gives me that inspiration to carry on and still see that beauty,” she said.
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