PORTLAND (AP) — State officials took the bald eagle off Oregon’s endangered species earlier this month as the number of birds in the state rebounds.

De-listing is an unusual action that recognizes a stirring comeback for the once critically endangered animal.

An estimated 500 to 700 bald eagles winter in southern Oregon’s Klamath Basin, where they feast on waterfowl that have likewise migrated south down the Pacific flyway.

At the former St. Johns landfill northwest of downtown Portland, workers track a breeding pair that has nested in a black cottonwood tree for the past four years.

The birds have been spotted on Sauvie Island, around Bend, at Wallowa Lake and throughout the lower Columbia River.

The state wildlife commission took bald eagles off the state endangered species list this month; it was removed from the federal list in 2007.

De-listings are uncommon — the Canada goose, two types of peregrine falcon and the Columbia white-tail deer were previously removed from the state list, and 33 animals remain. On the federal list, 1,391 animals and plants remain listed as threatened or endangered; about two-dozen were removed because they have recovered.

“It’s a definite feather in the cap, if you will, for the Endangered Species Act,” says Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist of the Geos Institute, a conservation research group based in Ashland. “In my lifetime we’ve recovered our national symbol.”

“It is remarkable,” agrees Martin Nugent, endangered species coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish Wildlife. “It was in danger of being wiped out in North America — that’s not an exaggeration.”

True enough. In 1963, the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service estimated only 417 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. The near disappearance kicked people into action. The government banned the pesticide DDT, which accumulated in eagles’ prey and fouled the birds’ reproductive systems. Federal listing as endangered in 1978 and state listing in 1987 slammed home regulations and reality. A public education campaign shamed careless shooters; state and federal logging laws protected habitat.

It worked. By 2006, researchers counted 9,789 breeding pairs in the lower 48.

When the federal government de-listed bald eagles, the ruling reflected the species health in the country as a whole. Oregon biologists waited until they’d finished analyzing a 30-year study of eagles by Oregon State University.

Oregon’s bald eagle population has grown from 65 resident nesting pairs in 1978, when the OSU study began, to about 570 now, Nugent said. Winter brings hundreds more to the state, migratory visitors to the Klamath Basin from Canada and the interior U.S.

© 2012 Herald and News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.