The alert came through and I knew before I opened it. Then I sobbed. Not the polite kind. The kind that surprises you with how far down it goes.
Jackie the bald eagle died this morning at a raptor center in Ojai, California. She was fourteen. I never touched her. I have watched her almost every night for years.
Some of us are wired this way. Some of us are not.
I called my mom. She tried. She loves me and she was reaching for the good.
What she said was close to this. You have so much on your plate right now, and now this on top of it.
She was trying to put it in proportion. Most people carry a ranking system for grief. Real problems at the top, then people, then pets, and somewhere near the bottom of the list, a bird you have never met.
Here is what I know. It would have hit exactly the same on an easy week.
That is the tell. Proportion is not how any of this works.
There are people who can hold an animal’s life at arm’s length and file it under sad. And there are the rest of us.
I used to think the difference was sensitivity. It is not. The difference is that some of us let them in, and once you do, your world is a different size permanently.
I am not going to spend a paragraph defending grief over a bird I met through a livestream. You either felt it today or you did not.
She let a few hundred thousand strangers into her house
The nest sits about a hundred and forty-five feet up a Jeffrey pine above Big Bear Lake.
I have been there. Years before Jackie and Shadow took up residency, before anyone put a camera in that tree, I stood in that valley. It was a mountain town with a lake in it. Pretty. Cold. Somewhere I passed through and did not think about again.
I did not look up.
Then a bird moved into a pine and that same valley became a place I think about before I fall asleep.
She did not change the geography. She changed what I could see in it.
I know what a Jeffrey pine looks like now. I know what an eagle’s chirp sounds like, which is nothing like what you would expect from a bird that size. I know that a flying squirrel named Fiona used to raid that nest at night. I know how long an eagle can go without eating, because they have a crop that stores food and releases it when they need it, and I learned that from watching one refuse to leave her eggs.
None of that was in my life five years ago. All of it is now.
That is what she did. A bird who had no idea we existed opened a whole country to people who would never otherwise have looked up.
She and Shadow were a comedy act. The sticks. The chirping back and forth. The absolutely unhinged protectiveness. Two wild animals doing entirely ordinary wild-animal work, and hundreds of thousands of us organizing our evenings around it.
She had the heart of a lioness
February 2024. An atmospheric river came through and buried that nest.
Jackie stayed on her eggs for sixty-two hours straight. She was fully snowbound at points. The camera showed a smooth white mound where a bird should have been. She shook the snow off and stayed put.
It set a record.
She did not do it for us. She had no idea we were there. She was not being brave, because brave requires a choice and she was doing what she was built to do.
That is exactly why it landed the way it did. We got to see devotion with no performance in it. No narration, no audience awareness, no reward. Just a body between the weather and what she loved.
How many of us would do that?
Homer got a brand-new world at fourteen
My friend Dr. Karen Becker adopted Homer when he was fourteen years old.
I have had the chance to work alongside Karen, Rodney Habib, and a number of the leading veterinarians and researchers in pet longevity. So I know how she thinks about an animal before I ever get to the part about Homer.
He had spent most of his life inside an assisted living facility with his person, then landed in rescue. His world had been narrow for a long time. He was not good with other dogs. He was afraid of birds. Karen met him at a Christmas Eve dinner at her aunt’s house, where her aunt was fostering him. He went home with her.
She figured out fast that smelling was his hobby. He was happiest outside. So outside is where he went, over and over, until birds stopped being frightening and other dogs stopped being frightening, and a senior dog most people would have described as set in his ways started investigating the world like he had just arrived in it.
She opened his world all the way up at an age when most dogs are handed a softer bed and less of everything else.
Then it went further than anyone planned. Homer put on a red cape and became the face of The Forever Dog Life, a number one New York Times bestseller. A dog whose entire world had been one room ended up on the front of a book that changed how hundreds of thousands of people feed their animals.
And he opened hers. That is the part people miss when they tell this story. He was not a project. He was the reason to be outside for hours. He taught the most-followed veterinarian on the planet what a fourteen-year-old rescue terrier still has in him.
That trade is always running in both directions. We just tend to only count one side of it.
Keiki and Jessie
I lost them forty-eight hours apart. A cat and a dog, gone inside two days.
I could tell you what that did to me. I would rather tell you who they were.
Keiki came to me at the end of a relationship, during the stretch where the other person decided the grass was greener and my world got very small very fast.
She had been abused before she got to me. Someone had used her like a ball and thrown her against a wall. She was missing a tooth from it.
She curled up on my lap and drooled through the gap where the tooth used to be.
A cat with every reason on earth to stay away from people picked a lap and stayed on it.
Jessie was my soul dog.
She came out of a shelter damaged and abused, and she had been there long enough to land on the kill list. That is the entire sentence. Her time had run out because nobody had picked her yet.
She grew into my right hand. She traveled the country with me. A dog who had been written off saw more of America than most people ever will.
She was on a list, and then she was in the passenger seat, and the years in between made my life unrecognizable from the one I would have had.
I have never liked the word rescue for what happened there.
Everything I have built since sits on top of those two. The company. The years of other people’s animals in my care. This publication. All of it traces back to a cat and a dog who opened a door I did not know was in the wall.
Rescue points the wrong direction
We say we rescued them. We put it on bumper stickers and in bios.
If a person actually opens up, the animal does the rescuing. Every time. That is the real arrangement and almost nobody has it labeled correctly.
I got to watch it happen a few hundred times.
Running a pet services company puts you inside people’s homes in a way almost no other work does. I saw who someone was before an animal arrived and who they were a year later. Quiet houses that started making noise. People who had stopped leaving the house going outside twice a day without thinking about it. Households that reorganized around a new center of gravity and never went back.
It happened to my team too. Put dogs and cats at the middle of a group of people and watch what builds around it. They soften. They talk to each other. They show up differently.
Dogs and cats are amazing. I do not have a more sophisticated way to say it, and I stopped looking for one a long time ago.
The word Dharma’s mom used
Four friends have lost their animals in the last few weeks. Four.
One of them texted me about her girl, Dharma. She said she was grateful for all the time she got with her. Grateful that Dharma had been entrusted to her, and that Dharma made her life so much better.
Entrusted to her.
That is the word. Not owned. Not adopted. Entrusted. She was handed a life to carry for a while, it made her own life bigger, and she is saying thank you in the middle of losing her.
They are not in our lives.
They are how our lives got this big.
Jackie
She was the first bald eagle chick anyone knows of hatching in Big Bear Valley. Born in 2012 to Ricky and Lucy. She took over their old nest, and in the summer of 2018 a male turned up and refused to leave. They called him Shadow.
She and Shadow fledged six. Luna and Sandy came last. Sandy was named for Sandy Steers, who ran Friends of Big Bear Valley and put those cameras up in the first place. Steers died earlier this year.
The woman who built the window went first. The eagle everyone watched through it followed her the same year.
Between them, they gave a global community what almost nobody gets anymore. A front-row seat to a life that owed us nothing.
Tonight we celebrate her. You brought us together. You let us see inside your world. You changed us, and you changed us for the better.
We love you, sweet girl. Thank you for changing my life.
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“Wellness is not just the absence of disease. It is actually recognizing that we can make intentional lifestyle choices on a daily basis that ultimately create abundant health.” — Dr. Karen Becker
That is the north star here. It always has been.
Media Release August 11, 2026
California Department of Fish and Wildlife News Release
SACRAMENTO – The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is saddened to share that Patient 26-519, the bald eagle from Big Bear Valley known as Jackie died in the overnight hours of August 9, 2026, while receiving intensive medical care at the Ojai Raptor Center. Despite periods of temporary improvement and extensive efforts by wildlife rehabilitation experts and veterinarians at the Ojai Raptor Center, Jackie’s condition ultimately continued to deteriorate after more than three weeks of intensive medical care.
In recent days, Jackie experienced additional health challenges, including a large blood clot in her wing and kidney, as well as another decline in her blood values.
Jackie recently underwent additional diagnostic testing, including a contrast CT scan, bone marrow biopsy and specialized testing for heavy metals. Veterinarians at Ojai Raptor Center worked closely with specialists across the country to evaluate the available findings while some test results remained pending. Despite intensive treatment, her prognosis became increasingly poor.
Following a necropsy performed by veterinary pathologists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the eagle’s remains will be transported to the National Eagle Repository, a one-of-a-kind facility operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Office of Law Enforcement. The National Eagle Repository receives, evaluates, stores, and distributes eagle remains, parts, and feathers to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes throughout the United States for religious, cultural, and ceremonial purposes. It also offers educational programs that promote understanding and conservation of bald and golden eagles.
“California mourns Jackie, the Big Bear bald eagle who reminded us of the beauty and wonder of California’s wildlife, and our shared responsibility to protect the habitats that sustain it," said Governor Gavin Newsom. “We’re grateful to the Ojai Raptor Center and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who partnered with our California Department of Fish and Wildlife to help Jackie in her time of need."
“Millions of people who will never set foot near Big Bear have watched, for years, as this eagle and her mate raised eaglets, lost eggs, survived extreme weather, fought for their nest — and, most recently, as the eagle fought for her own life. Sharing her story inspired deep care in people and a broader understanding of why conservation matters,” said CDFW Director Meghan Hertel. “While this eagle's story has ended, the inspiration and the lessons she gave so many people won't be forgotten. Our hope is that they inspire greater efforts to protect the wild places eagles and other species need to live out their lives."
Jackie was first admitted to the Ojai Raptor Center on July 18, 2026, after being found grounded. An initial examination revealed Jackie was thin and dehydrated and suffering from severe anemia, low blood protein, and kidney and lung abnormalities.
Immediate veterinary treatment included fluids, oxygen therapy, nutritional support and intensive, round-the-clock monitoring.
On July 22, Jackie received a blood transfusion using donor blood from Spirit, an ambassador bald eagle at the California Living Museum (CALM) Zoo in Bakersfield. Veterinary specialists hoped the transfusion would stabilize her anemia, and while she initially showed temporary improvement, her packed cell volume declined again by August 3. Advanced diagnostic testing showed thrombosis in her wing and near one kidney.
“Throughout Jackie’s time at Ojai Raptor Center, every decision was guided by the available medical evidence, her welfare, and our responsibility to do what was in her best interest,” said Chris Eksteen, Executive Director of the Center. “Though our team is heartbroken, it has been an extraordinary privilege to care for her.”
In summer 2012, Jackie became the first documented bald eagle chick hatched in Big Bear Valley. In October 2015, the Friends of Big Bear Valley installed a livestream nest camera that allowed people an intimate view of wild eagles in the nest. People around the world watched as Jackie and her mate, Shadow, hatched and raised their eaglets beginning in 2018. For several years, Jackie and Shadow were the only year-round bald eagle residents at Big Bear Lake.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is saddened by the passing of the beloved Big Bear Lake bald eagle, whose story captured the attention of people across the country and helped foster a deeper connection with wildlife,” said Paul Souza, Regional Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific Southwest Region. “The public’s connection to this eagle is a powerful reminder of why the conservation of bald eagles matters. We are grateful to our dedicated partners at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Ojai Valley Raptor Center for the compassion and expertise they provided throughout the eagle’s care.”
Jackie will be deeply missed by the dedicated wildlife rehabilitation staff, veterinary team, and thousands of people across the globe who spent hours watching and caring for her. CDFW is grateful for the lasting impact Jackie had on countless communities and all who cared for her.
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https://www.ojairaptorcenter.org/patient-26519?fbclid=IwcGRvZgVleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeHVr0EQ450CntFxgPzrFe5lcCdYvdyNWApRhcLEKk_jMl2epG8KXmaTW_uNg_aem_Kiz_uoD3us2_nyaSGBcqoA