by Gwendolyn Craig
Tom Rauber, of Dansville, holds an immature bald eagle.
About 53 years ago (click here), Tom Rauber saw something he never expected to see.
It was 1965 and the lineman with the Rochester Telephone Corporation would sometimes escape the city to eat his lunch in his truck parked near Hemlock Lake in Livingston County. He always loved the outdoors and wildlife, said his daughter Shelly Rauber Mistretta, but perhaps no one knew how much until he discovered the last pair of bald eagles in New York state.
They were in a shagbark hickory tree, Mistretta said laughing, sitting in a coffee shop in Skaneateles Tuesday, pictures of her father holding juvenile bald eagles sprawled on the table top.
"He just watched them quietly for I think the first four or five years, and we knew he was watching a bird, but it was weird," she said, recalling her elementary school-age memories of that time. "It was like we were in a secret society. We couldn't talk about it."
Rauber would keep a canoe hidden in the cattails on the lake to check on his endangered birds. Between the 1940s and 1960s, New York's nesting bald eagle pairs went from about 70 to just one. The devastating trend was seen across the country, except for Alaska, as hunters, habitat loss and a pesticide called DDT threatened the very existence of the eagle. Rauber, ecstatic about coming across this special pair, contacted the Albany branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where he was asked to monitor the birds and keep the agency updated.
More than three decades later, Rauber was still keeping bird journals. The telephone lineman turned wildlife rehabilitator became one of the most instrumental players in bringing the nation's bird back from the brink of extinction, along with the state Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife technician Mike Allen.
Both men died within about two months of each other last year — Allen on Oct. 28 and Rauber on Dec. 27....
