Jackie the Big Bear Bald Eagle: A Window Into Wonder

Jackie, the beloved bald eagle of Big Bear, California, recently passed away on Monday, August 10, and like many people who followed the nest cam over the years, I was surprisingly affected by the news.

I can’t remember exactly when I first started watching Jackie and her mate, Shadow, but at some point, checking the nest became a regular part of my life. Part of my connection to the nest was also a connection to place. I grew up in Riverside, California, and Big Bear was our nearest mountain escape. I snowboarded there in high school, so already had memories tied to that landscape. Watching Jackie and Shadow high above Big Bear Lake felt very nostalgic and reminiscent of home.

I watched through nesting seasons and followed along as eggs were laid, waiting to see whether they would hatch. When they didn't, I felt a sense of sadness and loss. When they did, I felt joy and excitement watching eaglets grow from awkward balls of gray fluff into birds preparing to leave the nest. I enjoyed witnessing Sunny and Gizmo grow up in 2025, and then Sandy and Luna the following year. I also watched a tremendous amount of absolutely nothing happen. That may be one of the things I loved most about it.

A Camera Pointed at a Pile of Sticks

Most of the time, the Big Bear eagle cam wasn’t particularly exciting. Jackie sat there, while Shadow would arrive with a new stick. He'd carefully positioned it into place, only for Jackie to get up and move it. Their humorous antics would brighten my day. Watching them perch peacefully on a branch for hours brought peace to me as well.

What began as cameras pointed toward a wild eagle nest became, for me and people around the world, a tiny window into another life. If you watched long enough, all that apparent nothingness started becoming interesting. You began noticing things, discovering patterns and a bit of eagle personality. The official eagle logs are full of descriptions of the two rearranging one another’s work, negotiating particularly unruly sticks and returning again and again to make small adjustments to the nest.

You learned their routines and recognized behaviors. You knew when something seemed different. The nestcam became a "sit spot" where you could observe and learn. That, to me, is where this story becomes about something larger than bald eagles.

When an Animal Becomes a Character

There is something a little strange about all of this. We named them Jackie and Shadow. Their offspring got names. People talked about their personalities and relationships. We laughed about disagreements over sticks and interpreted beak movements as kisses. We worried about them, cheered them on, and assumed they felt deep grief and loss when bad things happened, because we did.

Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with how far that can go. Just reading crazy comments on Instagram tells you that some people get a little carried away!

Wild animals are not people. Their behavior doesn’t need to fit neatly into our human stories about romance, parenthood, courage or grief. And when our emotional attachment becomes so strong that we expect nature to behave according to the story we want, I think we risk missing the thing we claimed to love in the first place: their wildness.

There is a difference between observing an animal with affection and requiring it to become a character in our own emotional drama. But I don’t think the answer is to remain completely detached either. Because something very real happens when we watch another living creature closely. We begin to care, and caring about nature is important since we humans are supposed to stweard the earth. The fact of the matter is that attention creates empathy, which is good! Jackie is no longer merely a bald eagle. She is this particular eagle whose life we have watched, and because of that, we care for her wellbeing.

Jackie Was a Window Into Wonder

The nest cam didn't show us something extraordinary every day, it taught us how to see the extraordinary in an ordinary life. For those willing to stay awhile, the nest slowly revealed an entire world.

You noticed the weather, changing seasons, the rhythms of nesting and feeding. The patience required to incubate an egg. The astonishing rate at which an eaglet grows. The constant maintenance of a nest that, from the ground, might look like nothing more than a messy bundle of sticks. You watched Jackie sit through snowstorms until she was literally buried, only to find out later that despite her devotion and resilience, those eggs never hatched.

We can call that instinct, and biologically, of course, much of it is. But knowing that doesn’t make it less remarkable. If anything, I think it should make us more curious.

What Can a Bald Eagle Teach a Human?

Drawing has taught me that almost anything becomes interesting when you look at it long enough. For example, at first you see a tree. Then you begin drawing it. And soon you notice that the branches don’t divide the way you assumed. You see repeating patterns. You notice where the bark changes direction, how one cluster of foliage overlaps another, where the light catches one edge and disappears on the other.

It's just another tree. But noticing little things like this about it seem to open up a door of wonder. We glimpse a hidden majesty that suddenly unveiled itself, simply because we noticed.

I think watching Jackie worked in much the same way. The nest cam gave us permission to linger, and in a culture that constantly pushes us to move on to the next thing, lingering can be surprisingly powerful. Observation gives us something to reflect upon. We see something, and then we wonder about it, and those questions of curiosity is what makes life richer.

So what can a bald eagle teach a human?

I hesitate even writing that question because Jackie was not trying to teach us anything. She was just being an eagle. Still, human beings have always learned by observing the world around us. We watch and make connections, then consider what we have seen and ask whether there is wisdom there for our own lives.

Watching Jackie, I saw resilience and devotion. I saw a creature entirely occupied with the life she had been given to live. She seemed loving, fierce, competent, majestic. Those interpretations belong to me, not to her. But that doesn’t make the reflection meaningless. Observation becomes contemplation. Contemplation can become wisdom.

Keep Looking Up.

When I reflect on Jackie and the nest, I think one of the gifts she gave us was the gift of wonder. It was freely available to all who would have the curiosity and patience to sit and watch even if just for a few minutes. Every day, millions of people stopped what they were doing and looked into a nest high above Big Bear Lake. Often nothing remarkable happened. And somehow, that was the remarkable part.

We learned the rhythms of animals most of us would otherwise know only as distant silhouettes in the sky. We began to care about the survival of creatures we'd never touched, seen in person, and probably never would. How interesting! How strange!

How beautiful.

A camera pointed at a pile of sticks became a doorway into wonder. The ordinary world is far more extraordinary than we ever thought. Living life with awe and wonder means remaining awake enough to see it. It's there, we just have to look. Jackie was a window into that world for me and she will always remind me to keep looking up.