Protecting bald eagles during Lehigh Acres Park expansion

On Monday, Lee County commissioners will vote on a plan to limit disruptions to nearby bald eagles during construction on Lehigh Acres Park.

The goal of the plan is to have crews avoid construction within, ideally, 660 feet of the nearby eagle’s nest during nesting season. If the construction must happen closer to the nest, they’ll have to monitor the eagles.

Crews will clear some trees to make space for a pair of disc golf holes, a new pedestrian path, shaded areas, and more as part of the expansion of Lehigh Acres Park. All of that will happen at least 450 feet away from the tree with the eagle nest. During nesting season, which lasts from October until May, Lee County will have a qualified ecologist or biologist check the nest up to three times a week while there is construction.

Billy Gunnel, associate professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University, says it is important to consider bald eagles in the construction process.

“If the construction is done proactively, we can live with bald eagles,” Gunnel said. “However, if we do construction where we knock down everything and then we drain our retention ponds and then, basically, we make it a sterile landscape and then build on top of that, the bald eagles are not going to do well.”

There are laws in place to protect eagles and their habitats. Lee County says bald eagle management plans are routine anytime there’s construction near a nest.

“It can disrupt the nesting, but more often than not, it is about directly interacting with a nest,” Gunnel said. “Eagles do very well in our cities. As long as there is an appropriate habitat, they can live with us in some of our most dense areas, so construction should not necessarily mean ‘no.’ We just can’t do it in a fairly superficial and a fairly old-school way. We actually have to think about the animal and how we get the animal into that landscape.”