Famed ‘Eagle Lady’ Doris Mager of Florida dies at 98 after soaring life

Doris Mager, who 44 years ago famously camped in a vacant bald eagle nest in Central Florida to boost awareness of the species’ plight, lived until the end an extraordinary, extroverted and high-energy life full enough for three people, maybe more, her son agrees.

But early in her 9th decade, Mager seemed at risk of cutting her years short whenever she parked her enormous, residence-on-the-road camper van at her North Carolina mountaintop home.

For better traction, she would launch her multi-ton Chevrolet in reverse up a narrow spine of an unpaved lane. The thrust of her wheels clawed madly for momentum, spewing dust and gravel for something like 100 yards.

There was nothing to it for Mager, who in her youth had been a truck driver.

“I don’t want to sound bad, but I lost concern about my mom quite a while ago,” said her son, Bill Mager, sounding admiring. “She was excited to do what she did. She was her own woman. She knew what she was doing. And, so, people used to ask me, ‘well, are you worried?’”

Mager said he has had his tears and said his goodbyes, and will join with friends to spread his mom’s ashes this weekend near his home in Washington state.

Having spent the previous evening phoning friends, she slipped away quietly Thursday morning of an ailing heart at 98, spiritually grounded by owls, hawks, eagles and their habitats and ready to join them in the next, he said.

“She took up a lot of space for such a small woman,” Bill Mager concluded.

In 2019, Audubon’s magazine published an account about the national environmental group’s Center for Birds of Prey in Maitland and how Doris Mager figured critically in its creation.

“When Doris Mager blinked her eyes open on the morning of June 15, 1979, she found herself not under the blankets of her bed, but 50 feet above ground, perched among the branches of a longleaf pine,” the story begins. “She had just completed the first night of what would be a weeklong stay in a spacious, inactive eagle’s nest in the woods outside Maitland, Florida.”

That put Mager on the map as a celebrity but also significantly turned up the wattage of public concern for bald eagles’ plunge then toward extinction, said Charles Lee, himself a storied figure in Audubon Florida’s environmental advocacy.

“She was one of the first people who I saw when I joined Audubon,” Lee said of meeting her in 1972 when he was 22.

“At the time, she was managing the Audubon gift shop in an old, wooden building,” Lee said. “We did not have a birds of prey program. And Doris really was the spark of life that moved Audubon into the birds of prey rescue and rehabilitation business. She started out in a very modest way, but the Center for Birds of Prey that we have today is really the result of her pioneering work.”

The center, with eagles, vultures and a wide variety of other raptors, next to Eatonville and overlooking Lake Sybella, is now one of Central Florida’s more popular destinations.

Following her stay in the eagle’s nest, Mager, who became instantly known as the Eagle Lady, scrambled down from the towering pine, which had swayed so much she took motion-sickness pills.

She had only just begun to share a passion and energy that coworkers and friends would marvel at and then take for granted. Even her end, despite closing in on the century mark, didn’t really seem plausible.

“I talked to her last night and she was in high spirits but she knew things were coming to an end,” said Tanya Fickett on Thursday afternoon.

Fickett is the granddaughter of Stephen Fickett Jr., a renowned birder from Florida who in 1983 teamed with Mager to found Save Our American Raptors, or SOAR. “And then this morning, which we weren’t expecting, I got the call. And I was like, ‘oh my gosh.’”

Despite her robust personality, Mager was solicitous and concerned for others. Out of the blue and periodically, she would call people she had met only a few times to say hi.

That’s how Mager gathered up an enormous number of allies and supporters – that, along with her solo, nonstop, coast-to-coast roadshow in her live-aboard van with a collection of owls and hawks for presentations in whatever venue would have her.

“I love that she is a tough, crazy, feisty, interesting woman,” said Clermont birdwatcher Steve Grant, shortly after Mager gave one such presentation at the Oakland Nature Preserve west of Orlando in 2016.

Mager’s resume would expand to include leading international birding adventures and founding an aerial eagle nest survey program that state authorities would inherit.

Bill Mager said his mother left her North Carolina home about seven years ago to move in with him, taking up a separate part of his rural Washington home where she lived independently.

Finally, at 95, she drove from Washington state to a nature center in Connecticut to donate her van and longtime companion, a fearsome looking great horned owl, E.T.

More recently, Mager suffered a minor heart attack and was deemed a candidate for a stent to be inserted into an artery. But, a surgeon warned that at her age complications would likely arise that she would not survive.

“She did not like to live like she was living the last week and a half or two weeks,” Bill Mager said. “It didn’t work for her. She was ready.”

In the 1980s, his mother had paid $380 in advance to the Cremation Society of America. The son called to learn if the purchase was still valid – and it was.

“Everything’s taken care of as a matter of fact,” he said, a little surprised by his mother’s arrangements so long ago. “They’ve already picked up her body from the hospital and are taking it up to be cremated and will bring her ashes tomorrow.”

The ashes will be spread around a pond at the Columbia River, lively with birds that she visited often in her final years.

Word of her death traveled quickly, including to Pat Harden and her husband, Fred, in Gainesville. They had been friends for 50 years through Pat Harden’s time as chairman of the St. Johns River Water Management District, the prime custodian of Orlando’s water supply.

“I will never see another eagle without thinking of Doris and how much she loved and spread the word across the nation about the beauty and value of birds of prey,” Harden said.

“I like to think of her now as soaring with R.J. and E.T. and Impy and Cara, her golden eagle, great horned owl, little screech owl and Mexican eagle, along with many others of her feathered flock.”