Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced their removal of the bald eagle from the Endangered Species List. In a press release, the service described the remarkable recovery of the species:

After nearly disappearing from most of the U.S., the bald eagle is now flourishing and no longer needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act. The nation’s symbol has recovered from an all-time low of 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to an estimated high of 9,789 breeding pairs today, and will be removed from the list of threatened and endangered species.

For the most part, environmentalists seem to be happy about the decision. An article from The L.A. Times quotes representatives from several environmental groups applauding the decision, or at least the recovery that made it possible. For example, John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation called it “one of the greatest wildlife success stories” in history.

But the party probably won’t last long, and once it’s over, everyone’s going to go back to fighting each other. The Center for Biological Diversity’s lawsuit over the status of Arizona’s desert-nesting bald eagle is pending in court (see our story, “In the Arizona desert, feathers are flying“). The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation is so upset that the eagles will still be protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, that they say the eagle might as well have not been de-listed at all (that sounds like good news for the eagles). And the L.A Times says the Bush Administration is preparing new regulations that would make it harder to list new species in the future.