One of the most notable quotes from modern history was uttered in 1969 by astronaut Neil Armstrong when the lunar module of the Apollo 11 space mission touched down on the moon in 1969.

“The Eagle has landed,” he said.

Forty years later, the same phrase can be said on the banks of the Grand River and, for many, it has no less significance. After disappearing for years, the eagle has landed there, too, and it may be there to stay.

The bald eagle’s resurgence in the area is a testament to the progress in environmental rehabilitation and the improvement in man’s co-existence with other species.

Paul Cross, a Humber College professor of radio broadcasting, was speaking in Orangeville last week as part of that college’s lecture series. He presented a film he had produced in 2006, The Return of the Eagles, which chronicles the story of the bald eagles’ remarkable comeback.

“I think it’s a great story,” he said in an interview. “I grew up living on the Grand River in Cambridge. Our back yard backed on to it.

“My family lived there and my grandparents lived there. We had never heard of bald eagles being there, nor did we ever think they should have been there.”

The film is, in a roundabout way, a celebration of the rehabilitation of the Grand River and Lake Erie and alleviating the problem of chemicals, notably DDT and PCBs, which were depleting fish stocks and therefore causing the eagles to up and disappear.

While the raptor is more numerous, it’s far from its heyday of a century ago, when there was a pair of bald eagles for every mile of the Lake Erie shoreline and a similar number of nests along the banks for the Grand.

When Mr. Cross made his film, there were 1,400 such birds in Ontario and there were about 30 known nests in the Lake Erie basin and the Grand River watershed. Not an immense number, but it did allow the bald eagle’s status to be downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened.”

The eagle, while wary of human intrusion, manages to exist along a river that flows 300 kilometres from near Dundalk to Lake Erie and has over 1 million people living in its proximity.

In fact, according to The Return of the Eagles, bald eagles are nesting close to the 401, North America’s busiest highway.

The eagles, the film explains, get used to the consistent droning of the 401 traffic. On the other hand, they tend to vacate the area if people get up close and personal. Bald eagles can be startled by an all-terrain vehicle passing close to their nest, or even somebody out for a walk, and flee.

Mr. Cross felt there should be a parameter of between 300 and 400 metres surrounding a nest site that would be off limits to people.

“Eagles tend to nest on more remote wilderness stretches,” he said. “I hope we’re going to be careful about the eagles. I don’t see us really doing anything, right now, to protect them and ensure their recovery.” Still, public attitudes have certainly changed for the better.

For example, between 1917 and 1953, the Territory of Alaska said the bald eagles were competing with humans for the salmon in the region and were contributing to the fish’s deletion.

A bounty was imposed and the bald eagle, symbolic of American strength and freedom, was hunted down and slaughtered to the point where a total of 128,000 had been killed.

The bounty was discontinued shortly before Alaska officially became a state in 1959 and the birds came under the protection of the National Bald Eagle Act.

In 1971, there was another bounty, of sorts. This time, the National Wildlife Service was paying $500 for information leading to the conviction of anyone shooting a bald eagle.

For certain, Paul Cross’s vigilance has not ended with the making of The Return of the Eagles. He will always be on the lookout for them and have his high-definition camera ready to take photos (from 300 to 400 metres away, of course).

“The eagles,” he said in the interview, “are in my blood.”