Bald eagle recovery leader Steve Sherrod dies at age 76
Longtime Sutton Center Director remembered as “an unstoppable force”
Conservationists nationwide are mourning the passing of a pioneer in raptor recovery whose impact on bald eagles continues to soar.
Steve Kent Sherrod, founding executive director of the George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center in Bartlesville and a driving force behind the recovery of the southern bald eagle, died May 26 after a sudden downturn in a years-long fight with Parkinson’s Disease. He was 76.
He joined the Center at its beginning 40 years ago and only fully retired in 2020. Under his guidance, the Center’s work on endangered species has enhanced species recovery efforts worldwide.
The Bald Eagle program drew national media coverage in major newspapers and magazines like National Geographic in the 1980s and 1990s. Sherrod brought an eagle on a 1995 Today Show slot with Katie Couric, and, ultimately, in 2007, he was invited to the White House celebration to mark the delisting of bald eagles from the Endangered Species List.
Friends, family, and colleagues remembered him as a history-making conservationist and a driving force who could apply keen attention to scientific detail while managing broad visions for organizing and financing ambitious projects.
Such was his influence on the bald eagle program, his early work with peregrine falcon recovery, and in more recent years, as the Sutton Center took on research efforts on grassland birds, including grouse and prairie chickens, and repopulation efforts for endangered Masked Bobwhite Quail in Arizona and Attwater’s Prairie Chickens in Texas.
He was an honored member of the North American Falconers Association and Oklahoma Falconers Association. He also served five years as the founding board president of the North American Grouse Partnership.
Early connections
“He has been the backbone of the Sutton Center forever,” said Lena Larsson, Sutton Center executive director.
Whether redesigning a building, improving an egg incubator design, or planning a complete program and funding model, Sherrod seized the opportunity, she said.
“He was just one of those people who knew how to get things done, and he really thought things through to the smallest detail,” she said.
Born on April 15, 1948, in Bethany, Oklahoma, he had an immediate passion for nature as a child, from snakes to birds, and it never waned. His devotion to falconry and depth of knowledge first connected him with ornithologist George Miksch Sutton at the University of Oklahoma, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree.
His post-grad work laid the groundwork for his return to Oklahoma. While at Brigham Young University, he studied bald eagle ecology in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. At Cornell University, he gained his Ph.D., working on the recovery of endangered peregrine falcons.
He was ready when the new Sutton Center needed a leader for bald eagle recovery visions.
His daughter, Alison Sherrod, said his eagle program and outreach efforts made him widely known as “The Bird Man.” He often visited her school when she was a child–and later created a live-bird flight education program at Sutton. She said that people she knew as children still remember her father and his birds as adults.
“He was always ‘The Bird Man’ even at home,” Alison Sherrod said. “We always had creatures of some sort around us. At one point, I had a cockatoo, a pet crow, chameleons, and a macaw; my actual first word was ‘bird,’” she said.
Alison Sherrod remembered her father as “constantly busy” but still able to find time to attend school events, take her and her younger brother, Scott, fishing, and help with very cool science fair projects.
“He was a great dad,” she said.
An unstoppable force
Longtime friend Joel Saltore credited Sherrod with launching his career as a National Geographic photographer. In 1991, he spent two weeks at the Center on his first assignment for the magazine. Sherrod set him up to catch critical moments with minute details of bird behavior and the life stages of the eaglets.
“He couldn’t have been kinder to me,” he said. “He was strategic, and we talked through all the different photo situations you could get.”
The two remained friends for life. Saltore described his Sherrod as an unstoppable force with a wicked sense of humor.
“He was very much like a falcon himself; he moved quickly, he was sleek and thin and fit, and he was all focus, looking forward all the time. Completely focused and driven, very much like the birds he took care of all those years,” Saltore said.
Don Wolfe, a senior biologist at Sutton, and then assistant director Alan Jenkins were with Sherrod on the first trip to Florida to collect eagle eggs. They drove home non-stop in an old RV, rotating roles. Jenkins said one person drove, one rested, and one sat with the egg incubator on their lap to reduce vibrations or jolts that might damage eggs.
“Those eggs were precious cargo because there were a lot of people who didn’t think it would work,” Jenkins said. “I remember one time we got to Oklahoma, and it was snowing. That wasn’t the best situation, but we made it.”
Wolfe said the Sutton program broke ground in several areas that critics dismissed as unworkable, but Sherrod hit the hurdles and kept going.
Eggs collected early in the season from Florida eagle nests allowed pairs to lay a second clutch, so taking eggs did not impact that state’s population. Sherrod designed incubators for the eggs right down to the foam and temperature regulation devices. People also doubted that immature bald eagles (not sexually mature until age five) would return to their release areas to mate.
He said the Sutton Eagle Project proved Sherrod’s intuitions accurate on all counts.
The team also learned hard lessons, including feeding frozen fish to the first hatchlings.
“Some of the eaglets were getting sick, and Steve just dug in and figured it out,” Wolfe said. “It was a problem at other facilities, too, Patuxent, Dollywood, but no one knew why.”
Sherrod’s dogged pursuit eventually led him to zookeepers and their penguins.
“He found out they developed a thiamine deficiency if you fed them frozen fish,” Wolfe said. “Nobody knew about it but people at zoos who were raising penguins. People said, ‘Yes, this happens, and we don’t understand why.’ but Steve was the one who couldn’t rest until he figured it out.”
When Sutton Center launched its eagle program in the mid-1980s, Oklahoma and several other southern states had no nesting eagles. Larsson said the Sutton Center Bald Eagle Survey Team’s winter 2023 report documented 303 active nests and at least 333 young hatched in Oklahoma.
In 1987, Sherrod told the Dallas Morning News, “There’s something really magical about the eagle. If you look in an eagle’s eye, there’s something there people feel and they like to identify with. I think they portray nobility, courage, strength, freedom. We don’t have to have them. But what kind of value do you put on the national symbol? They’re something of beauty. There’s something special about being able to see them in the wild.”
Sherrod is survived by his ex-wife Linda Sherrod, his children Alison and Scott, and his grandchildren Skye Sherrod, Tristan, and Kate Williams. He is also survived by his older sister, Nancy Wilson, and nephew, Sandro Sherrod.
A private memorial service will be held to celebrate his life. Instead of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center to continue Sherrod’s legacy of bird conservation.
