(Theodore Parisienne)
A bald eagle flies in Brooklyn.
The symbol of the nation was spotted soaring above the famed Brooklyn Bridge last weekend in a sighting captured by eagle-eyed photographer Theodore Parisienne.
Experts at Cornell confirmed the bird is a two-year-old immature bald eagle — the white on the belly differentiates it from a first-year bird — which in time will grow the distinctive white head plumage that makes the raptor such a striking and unmistakable icon.
Although spotted above the East River, the eagle likely doesn’t call the Big Apple home, experts said.
“We do not have resident eagles here; they breed largely north or here so a juvenile could have been going back and forth,” said Rita McMahon, executive director of the Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center on the Upper West Side.
“People do see the bald eagles. They’re mostly in passing, but it’s a glorious thing — as you drive up the West Side Highway, you should always look up,” she added.
Another great spot for an eagle sighting in New York City is in Central Park, looking over the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, McMahon said.
Nearly wiped out by hunting and the pesticide DDT, bald eagles in New York State have been on the rebound. The state Department of Environmental Conservation, which launched an extensive effort to reintroduce the birds here with eagles from other states, counted 658 bald eagles statewide in 2010, up from a low of just 35 in 1981.
Closer to New York City, the DEC spotted 74 birds along the lower Hudson River in 2010; from 1980 to 1995, the number of birds spotted by volunteers were more likely to be zero or in the single digits.
Nesting pairs, which stay in New York year-round, have risen from a single couple in 1970 to 223 today, the department said in an annual report.