I have been crying over a bald eagle I never met.

Jackie died this morning in Ojai. She was fourteen. Three weeks ago two younger eagles jumped her near the lake and she rolled onto her back and fought them off with her talons, which is apparently what you do, and then she couldn’t fly. Anemia she couldn’t climb out of. That’s the whole story.

I have not been following Jackie and Shadow for long. Shadow is her mate. They have been together eight years and their nest sits a hundred and fifty feet up a pine above Big Bear Lake with a camera on it around the clock.

I got pulled in the way everybody gets pulled in, which is that Facebook decided I needed this and I did not disagree. Egg count. Snow on the nest. It’s a very effective machine, and I was one of hundreds of thousands watching it run. Possibly millions, across all the feeds carrying her.

She had a hard year. Ravens got her first two eggs in January. She laid two more in February and both of those hatched in April and both of those chicks fledged and left the valley two weeks ago. Then she got in a fight and that was that. I keep wondering if the second clutch cost her something. Nobody knows. I’m not sure why I want it to be a reason.

Nature has no empathy. Shadow will find another mate, probably by fall, and the cam will keep running and people will name the new eggs. None of that explains the crying.

Part of it, I suspect, is geography. I grew up in Lake Arrowhead, about twenty miles west of Big Bear along the Rim of the World Highway. Same mountains. Same pines. That nest is in country I knew before I knew much of anything else, and I don’t think I registered that until I was already in too deep.

The rest of it is that I watched, every day, and somewhere in there I stopped watching a bald eagle and started watching a character. Devoted mother. Tough old girl. Fought off two attackers and couldn’t quite get home. None of that is what she was. She was a fourteen year old raptor doing raptor things in a bad year, and I dressed her in a story, and then the story ended the way stories do and it landed on me like news about someone I knew. That’s my doing, not hers.

I don’t get touched like this often. I get touched more by an animal going than by a lot of people going, which I know is a strange thing to admit out loud and I’m going to admit it anyway.

Here is the part I want to sit with. All that noise did something. The Ojai Raptor Center opened a fund the day after she arrived and took in more than eight thousand donations in the first day, mostly twenty five and fifty dollars at a time, and they were clear from the start that the money was for this eagle and every eagle that comes in after her. They take in about a thousand birds a year. Almost none of those birds have a name. While she was dying they were also posting about how to tell a bald eagle’s call from a red-tailed hawk’s, and how you protect a bird’s wrists while you’re treating her, teaching a few hundred thousand people something they had no reason to know last month.

She was a better ambassador for the birds that come next than she ever was a celebrity. Nobody gets to be both on purpose.

The announcement this morning did not open with her name. It said Patient 26-519. Somewhere in that building she was a chart and a blood count and a set of numbers that kept going the wrong direction, and a room full of people sat up with her for three weeks anyway, knowing how it was probably going to end. Thank you to them.