Big Bear Valley · California · 6,752 feet
Jackie
2012 — 2026
“In remembrance of our beloved Jackie — soar high and free with Sandy.”
Friends of Big Bear Valley · August 2026
This is her whole life, told as one story. Every date on this page links to the people who recorded it.
First light
A first, in a valley that had never had one
Before her, no bald eagle chick had ever been documented hatching in Big Bear Valley. Eagles came down from the north in winter, counted each year by volunteers with spotting scopes, and left again in spring.
Then a pair the Forest Service called Ricky and Lucy stayed. In the first week of January 2012 they laid eggs in a nest at the top of a dead tree, and on February 21, 2012 a chick was observed — the first bald eagle known to be born in the valley. It fledged on April 23.
Volunteers named the chick Jack, for a long-serving Forest Service eagle-count volunteer. Then the chick kept growing — past one parent, then past the other. In bald eagles, the bigger bird is the female.
They named her Jack and I came back and said, no, that’s not Jack. That’s Jackie. She’s too big to be a Jack, because the males are smaller than the females.
John Saunders · Captain John’s Marina · FOX 11, Aug 10 2026
The dead tree did not last. Weakened — FOBBV notes, fondly — by “Jackie’s flapping practice that had dislodged many sticks,” her natal nest blew down in a windstorm shortly after she fledged. Ricky and Lucy had already started a second nest in a strong, healthy Jeffrey pine about fifty feet away.
That second nest is the famous one. The nest the world came to watch exists because her first one fell down.
Young bald eagles usually leave their birthplace for years of wandering before they settle. Jackie, as far as anyone can tell, never left Big Bear at all. It was the first rule she broke; it would not be the last.
FOBBV · Eagle History FOBBV · Quick Reference CDFW · Aug 11 2026 LA Times · Mar 3 2026
The camera, and the empty nest
Someone wanted to see inside
Her name was Sandy Steers — a biologist by training who had retired to the mountains, taken up birdwatching, and joined the winter eagle counts. In 2012 she was asked to keep watch on a newborn chick. She stood in a parking lot with a spotting scope for hours a day, and watched Jackie grow up.
I stood there for hours every day just watching, because I was fascinated. That got me hooked, and then I just wanted to see more.
Sandy Steers · FOBBV executive director · USA Today, Mar 2023
When eggs failed and chicks were lost for reasons no one on the ground could see, she wanted answers — “What happened? Why didn’t they hatch? Could I have saved them?” Two years of planning and fundraising later, in October 2015, Friends of Big Bear Valley installed a solar-powered camera beside Ricky and Lucy’s nest, about ten thousand dollars’ worth of lens and hope, with an infrared night light no eagle or human can see.
The camera’s first season watched an empty nest. Ricky and Lucy had quietly built a new one a quarter-mile away.
Then, in the fall of 2016, a near-adult female began visiting the abandoned nest — the right age, the right feather patterns, in a valley where only three bald eagles had lived year-round since 2012. Jackie had come home to her parents’ nest, with an unbanded male the Forest Service called Mr. B. They mated on camera that season. No eggs came: she was barely five, likely still too young.
FOBBV · Eagle History CDFW · Aug 11 2026 LAist · Feb 2026 USA Today · Mar 2023
Motherhood, loss, and a new mate
Two chicks, one storm, and the arrival of Shadow
Her first clutch came in the first days of January 2018 — two eggs, laid in snow. Both hatched in mid-February. Big Bear third-graders named the chicks Stormy and BBB, “Big Bear Baby.”
In late March a twenty-four-hour rainstorm was followed by a hard freeze. The chicks were too big to fit fully under a parent and too young for waterproof feathers. BBB died on March 23, most likely of hypothermia. Stormy — banded purple JR1, the first of only three of Jackie’s young ever to carry a band — fledged on April 26 and left the valley that summer.
Then came the stranger. An adult male appeared that summer and would not leave. Mr. B’s last appearance on camera was a standoff — no blood, just persistence — and then he was gone. Jackie accepted the newcomer. The name the community already had ready for him, Shadow, stuck.
FOBBV · Eagle History FOBBV · Quick Reference
Jackie & Shadow
The famous pair, and the years that tested them
On March 6, 2019, Jackie laid the first egg she and Shadow ever had together. A second followed on the 9th, live on camera. Both hatched in mid-April.
Cookie died at six weeks, in another cold late-spring storm. His brother Simba fledged that July — the first chick Jackie and Shadow raised to the sky together. It was the shape her life would keep from then on: the mountain gives, and the mountain takes.
2020: two eggs, incubated for more than sixty days. Neither had ever developed. Ravens took what remained. 2021: her hardest run — two clutches, five eggs, ravens again, and one chick that began to hatch and never finished. FOBBV wrote that the losses “seemed to impact Jackie and Shadow’s behavior greatly.”
And then 2022: one egg hatched on March 3, and the chick — named Spirit by classroom vote — treated the second, unhatched egg as a security blanket, snuggling against it and guarding it from her own parents. Spirit fledged on the last day of May.
The sunset kiss — the frame the community loved best of the two of them.
FOBBV cam · Dec 9, 2023She bossed Mr. B around like crazy and he was kind of wimpy. But Shadow kind of stands up to her sometimes, and she seems to like that better.
Sandy Steers · USA Today, Mar 2023
FOBBV · Eagle History FOBBV · Quick Reference LA Times · Jul 2019
In late February 2023, atmospheric rivers stalled over the mountains and dropped forty-five inches of snow in three days.
Jackie had two eggs under her. She did not get up.
Twenty-seven hours without relief at the storm’s worst. This is the photograph her life is remembered by.February 25, 2023 · 11:09 a.m.
The white season
The winter the world started watching
The nest disappeared. Then most of the eagle disappeared — a smooth white mound with a dark head keeping its shape against the wind. The images went everywhere, and a wildlife camera above a mountain lake quietly became one of the most-watched nature streams on Earth.
The eggs never hatched. On March 6, nearly two weeks past the expected date, FOBBV told the community what the community already feared; more than 12,000 people were watching the stream together that afternoon. The next day, with the nest unattended, ravens breached both eggs. There was no development inside to see.
It appears now that Jackie and Shadow’s eggs are not going to hatch this time. We cannot know exactly why — they could have not been fertilized, or could have stopped developing somewhere along the process.
Friends of Big Bear Valley · Mar 6, 2023 · via AP
What the world took from that winter was not the loss. It was the sitting — the refusal, hour after buried hour, to let the mountain decide. People who had never heard of Big Bear learned her name because she would not get up.
FOBBV · Eagle History AP · Mar 2023 FOBBV CAM · “Slow In The Snow”
Sixty-two hours
Three eggs, and a record no one wanted broken
In late January 2024 she laid three eggs — her first three-egg clutch, rare for any bald eagle. Then the El Niño storms came, and Jackie did what Jackie did.
She sat for more than 35 hours straight. Then, in the February storms, for 61 hours and 58 minutes — nearly three days without leaving the eggs once, wings tented over the nest bowl like an umbrella while the snow piled onto her back. Shadow offered to take over. She declined.
Jackie has been on the nest for over 35 hours straight… she is resilient beyond belief!!
Friends of Big Bear Valley · Feb 6, 2024 · via NBC LA
She and Shadow incubated that clutch for almost eighty days — weeks past any window in which hatching was possible. None of the three hatched. FOBBV offered a hypothesis, carefully labeled as one: at seven thousand feet, the thin air itself may not push enough oxygen through an eggshell. Nobody knows. The record says so.
FOBBV · Eagle History ABC7 · Feb 10 2024
Three chicks
Her fullest season, and one of her saddest
Another three-egg clutch in late January 2025 — and this time, over five days in early March, all three hatched. For the first time in her life, Jackie had a full nest. As many as 100,000 people watched at once during the hatch, by FOBBV’s own count.
On March 13 a multi-day storm dropped more than two feet of snow, and a berm rose around the nest bowl where no camera could see past it. The next day, Shadow lifted the body of the first-hatched chick to the edge of the nest. When Jackie returned she checked for herself. Then she carried the chick off the nest, into the forest.
FOBBV named the lost chick Misty, for Kathi Misterly, a longtime volunteer who had died of cancer. The survivors were named by fifty-four thousand submissions and a vote of Big Bear’s third, fourth and fifth graders: Sunny and Gizmo.
On June 2, Sunny flew. On June 7, Gizmo followed. It was the first time in Jackie’s life that two of her young left the nest on their own wings in the same season.
Sometimes nature’s hard to watch.
Sandy Steers · NPR, Jan 2025
FOBBV · Eagle History FOBBV · Quick Reference NBC News · Mar 15 2025 Fast Company · Mar 2025
A hard winter, a last best spring
Sandy and Luna
Her last year began with loss stacked on loss. On January 30, with the pair off the nest, a raven breached her first clutch of the season, live on the stream — though FOBBV later confirmed one egg had already cracked before the raven ever arrived. Twelve days later, on February 11, 2026, Sandy Steers died, at 73 — the woman who had watched Jackie grow up through a spotting scope and then built the camera so the world could watch too.
Jackie laid again — February 24 and 27. Both eggs hatched: April 4 at 9:33 p.m., and April 5 at 8:30 a.m., with 45,000 people watching the second hatch together on Easter morning. Schoolchildren chose the names on May 1 from 63,915 submissions — the single most-submitted name, offered 3,706 times, was Sandy. The other chick became Luna.
Sandy’s first flight, on June 28, was an accident. Luna tried to jump over her on the nest’s front-porch branch; Sandy lost her footing, fell through the branches, hung upside down for a moment, freed herself — and flew. Luna followed cleanly the next morning at 9:24, with Shadow waiting in the next tree. Both were 85 days old. Likely a female and likely a male, FOBBV judged, declining to test: “nature should be left to nature.”
On July 23, both eaglets were seen in the habitat for the last time — off, as FOBBV put it, on their grand adventures. The same week, one more piece of her story closed: the community finished raising $10,504,695.72 to buy Moon Camp, 63 acres of the last natural shoreline on the lake’s north shore, less than a mile from the nest. Sandy Steers had negotiated the purchase option as her final act. More than 25,000 people gave.
VVNG · Jan 30 2026 FOBBV · Moon Camp release Popular Science · May 2026 SB Sun · Jun 28 2026 Popular Science · Aug 2026
July 17 – August 11
The last flight
On the evening of Friday, July 17, Jackie was found on the shoreline at Dana Point Park, on the lake’s northwest side, unable to fly, after an altercation with two younger eagles. Residents stayed beside her. The Fawnskin fire crew guarded her for hours in the dark — FOBBV would come to call everyone on that shoreline “Jackie’s angels” — until the San Dimas raptor rescue team reached her around two in the morning.
No photograph of that night exists. What exists is what happened: a town standing in the dark around its eagle, waiting for help to come.
At the Ojai Raptor Center she became Patient 26-519 — by California regulation, a rehabilitating wild animal may only be publicly identified by intake number. The most famous eagle in the world spent her last weeks officially nameless, and the world watched anyway.
The exam found no fractures, no wounds that mattered, no fishing gear, no metal. It found something else: severe anemia, emaciation, and a mystery. The vets’ conclusion reframed the whole story — the fight had not made her sick. Being sick is why she lost the fight.
Severe anemia is a finding, not a diagnosis.
Ojai Raptor Center · Patient 26-519 FAQ
What followed was twenty-three days of medicine done in public — nine updates in three weeks, each one awaited around the world. A blood transfusion from a donor eagle — a non-releasable bald eagle in Bakersfield named, of all things, Spirit, who gave a quick draw and was paid in extra trout. A CT scan. A bone marrow biopsy. Nine veterinarians, two federal agencies, and one number that everyone on Earth who loved her learned to read: her packed cell volume, the share of her blood that was still red cells. Healthy is above 30.
Reported by the Ojai Raptor Center across nine public updates. Lead, zinc, rodenticide, aspergillosis, kidney disease and cancer were each tested for, and each ruled out.
There were good days. On July 29 she left intensive care; she was eating on her own and “much more feisty during feedings” — early on, FOBBV had relayed with obvious pride that she was “mad and fighting the staff… That’s our Jackie.” Cards began arriving at a P.O. box in Oak View, addressed to Patient 26-519.
And there were the other days. On August 9, ORC wrote: “The past 24 hours have been incredibly difficult… her condition is currently unstable.”
Ojai Raptor Center · FAQ ORC · patient gallery FOBBV · Eagle Log CDFW · Aug 11 2026 The full day-by-day record →
Jackie — the December before her last.
FOBBV cam · Dec 16, 2024She spent her last night in the oxygen unit at Ojai, receiving intensive care to the end.
She died in the overnight hours of August 9 into Monday, August 10, 2026.
She was fourteen years old.
Our team is heartbroken. It has been an extraordinary privilege to care for her.
Ojai Raptor Center · Aug 10, 2026 · their announcement
The necropsy, by veterinary pathologists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, found a large blood clot in her wing and near one kidney, and no single answer. Despite everything — the transfusion, the scans, the nine veterinarians — no one ever identified one definitive cause for her anemia. That unknown is part of her record, stated here the way this site states all its unknowns: plainly, and without a guess.
Her remains were transferred to the National Eagle Repository, the federal facility that provides eagle remains and feathers to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes for religious and ceremonial use. It is where the law, and ORC’s own respect for it, says an eagle belongs.
Please be kind to yourself, to others, to the FOBBV team and to those at the Ojai Raptor Center. Soar free Jackie…
Friends of Big Bear Valley · Aug 10, 2026
ORC · announcement CDFW · Aug 11 2026 ORC · FAQ
What remains
The valley she leaves behind
Shadow holds the territory. On August 13 he stepped into the nest for the first time in three weeks, and a young banded eagle called KD1 — hatched in 2022 in Orange County’s Prado Basin — followed him in and briefly preened his wing.
Is this a new bond forming between these 2? Well, it could be and it may not be, only time will tell.
Friends of Big Bear Valley · Eagle Log · Aug 13, 2026
Somewhere beyond the valley, if fortune has been kind, Sandy and Luna are learning what young eagles learn. Nobody can say — they carry no bands, only names. That is how this story has always worked: it gives you everything on camera, and then the forest keeps the rest.
What can be said is this. Because one eagle stayed home, a camera went up. Because a camera went up, millions of people watched a wild animal live an entire, unedited life — the snow and the ravens and the eggs that never hatched and the two that did. And because they watched, 63 acres of shoreline she hunted from will now never be developed, held in trust for whoever nests above Big Bear Lake for the next hundred years.
Jackie’s story has changed the future. Millions of people followed her life through the nest cameras. They celebrated her victories, worried through her challenges, and ultimately came together to help protect the place she calls home.
Ojai Raptor Center · Aug 2026 · via Big Bear Grizzly
Her life, counted
Counts of eggs and eaglets are ORC’s and FOBBV’s own; the viewership peak is FOBBV’s figure as told to Fast Company. Her exact weight and wingspan were never measured — not even in her final weeks — and this page will not invent them.
Jackie · 2012 — 2026 · first of her valley