Animals & Us
Sandy Steers
Sandy discovered that consciousness shapes healing, then built a life teaching that truth through two eagles watched by hundreds of thousands.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Sandy Steers spent twenty-four years building a life in Big Bear Valley, California, after leaving a computer consulting career in Long Beach. The mountains called to her in a way the city never did. She discovered that when she visited the forest, her body would calm, and when she returned to the LA Basin, the tension would return. It seemed pointless to keep going back and forth, so she sold her company and moved.
In 2012, the Forest Service found a bald eagle chick in a nest less than a mile from Sandy's house. It was the first eaglet ever hatched in Big Bear Valley. Sandy began watching through a spotting scope, taking notes. She became fascinated by how individual the eagles were. Each one had its own personality, its own tricks. The male, Shadow, would place sticks on the female Jackie's back to coax her off the nest so he could take a turn on the eggs. Jackie would scoot her feet in closer and closer under Shadow until she pushed him aside with sheer size. After years of watching, Sandy could almost predict what they would do next. When the pair hatched chicks again, she and Friends of Big Bear Valley installed a nest camera so people could watch them live. Hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world tuned in. People wrote to say the eagles calmed them through illness, through loss, through the noise of difficult times. Some sat beside dying parents and watched together.
Sandy's work in wildlife conservation and her practice of shamanism both rest on the same foundation: listening to nature, respecting everything as alive and individual, and allowing that respect to circle back to yourself. She believes wildlife is who we are. If wildlife is not healthy, there is no way for us to be healthy either. That connection between the natural world and human wellbeing shapes everything she does now.
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