Educational Media Reviews Online

It is a chilling fact that in 1980, as a result of human activity, there were no nesting bald eagles in all of Southern California. Return Flight: Restoring the Bald Eagle to the Channel Islands is an inspiring documentary film about the heroic efforts of wildlife biologists to reintroduce America’s national symbol of the wilderness to its historic nesting grounds off the coast of Southern California. The film begins by recounting the history of human predation and the decades of DDT pollution, which nearly resulted in the bald eagle’s extinction. Most of the film, however, is devoted to the 28 years of painstaking efforts that finally resulted in the first successful hatching of an eaglet on Santa Catalina Island in 2006. Conservation and restoration efforts have been so successful that, in the nesting season of 2013, there were 15 active eagle nests, including 16 successfully hatched eaglets, and a grand total of 60 eagles to be found among the Channel Islands.

Return Flight is a welcome, instructive, and genuinely positive contribution to the often discouraging news about the America’s wilderness and wildlife. The reviewer highly recommends this title for academic, public, and school library collections.