For years, millions of people around the world watched Jackie and Shadow raise their family high above Big Bear Lake. NewsPlus readers followed along as eggs were laid, eaglets hatched, winter storms covered the nest in snow, and sometimes nature brought heartbreak.

Now, one chapter of that story has come to an end.

Jackie, Big Bear Valley’s well-known female bald eagle, died overnight Aug. 9-10 at the Ojai Raptor Center following more than three weeks of intensive medical care. She was 14 years old.

Jackie was found grounded and unable to fly on July 18 and was transported to the wildlife rehabilitation center. Initial examinations found that she was thin and dehydrated and suffering from severe anemia, low blood protein and abnormalities involving her kidneys and lungs.

During her 23 days in care, Jackie received fluids, oxygen, nutritional support and around-the-clock monitoring while veterinarians and specialists worked to determine what was making her ill.

On July 22, she received a blood transfusion from Spirit, an ambassador bald eagle at the California Living Museum Zoo in Bakersfield. Jackie initially improved, but her anemia later worsened. Additional testing found serious blood clots in her wing and near one kidney, and despite continued treatment, her condition declined.

Jackie’s story began in Big Bear Valley long before cameras made her famous. In the summer of 2012, she became the first documented bald eagle chick to hatch in Big Bear Valley. She later returned to the area as an adult and eventually became part of the nesting pair whose lives would be watched around the world through the Friends of Big Bear Valley’s live eagle cameras.

Alongside her mate, Shadow, Jackie gave viewers a remarkable look at the lives of wild bald eagles. People watched the pair haul sticks into the nest, carefully arrange grasses before egg laying, trade incubation duties, defend their territory, and shelter eggs underneath their bodies during Big Bear’s sometimes heavy winter snowstorms.

Since 2018, Jackie laid 25 eggs and 10 eaglets hatched, including BBB and Stormy; Cookie and Simba; Spirit; Misty; Sunny and Gizmo; and, most recently, Sandy and Luna.

The 2026 nesting season was bittersweet. Jackie and Shadow lost their first two eggs in January after ravens breached the unattended nest. Then about a month later, Jackie surprised followers with a second clutch, laying eggs Feb. 24 and 27.

This time, both eggs hatched. Sandy emerged April 4, followed by Luna on April 5. More than 63,000 names were submitted before Big Bear Valley third-grade students selected their names.

NewsPlus followed their progress throughout the spring as the two eaglets grew from tiny chicks into increasingly independent young eagles.

Sandy and Luna were last seen on the Friends of Big Bear Valley cameras July 23 and are believed to have left the valley to begin the next stage of their lives.

Shadow remains in Big Bear Valley. In the weeks since Jackie’s death, he has continued to make occasional appearances around the nest and surrounding habitat. He has also been seen spending time near a banded 4½-year-old bald eagle known as KD1, or Kaydee, which hatched in Southern California in 2022.

Friends of Big Bear Valley has cautioned against reading too much into the visits. Whether a new bond eventually forms is something only time and another nesting season will tell.

The Big Bear community will have an opportunity to come together and remember Jackie this fall.

Friends of Big Bear Valley has announced that, along with other organizations, it is working on a community gathering to celebrate and honor Jackie on Saturday, Oct. 3. Additional details regarding the event are expected in the coming weeks.

The gathering will give those who followed Jackie through the years an opportunity to remember an eagle whose life became closely connected with Big Bear Valley and with people watching from around the world.

Following a necropsy, Jackie’s remains are to be transferred to the National Eagle Repository near Denver, operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The repository provides eagle feathers and other remains to enrolled members of federally recognized Native American tribes for religious, cultural, and ceremonial purposes.

Jackie was always a wild eagle. That may be what made the connection people developed with her so unusual.

Through a camera mounted high in a Jeffrey pine, viewers were allowed to quietly watch something that otherwise would have happened largely unseen: the everyday life of a bald eagle family.

They watched Jackie endure snowstorms, protect her eggs, raise eaglets with Shadow and return year after year to the Big Bear nest.

For NewsPlus readers who have followed Jackie and Shadow through those seasons, there will be one very noticeable absence when the cameras turn again toward the nest this fall.

Jackie will not be there.

But Sandy and Luna are somewhere beyond Big Bear Valley, beginning lives of their own, and Shadow continues to soar above the lake where Jackie herself first hatched 14 years ago.