Earlier this month, about 100 people came together at Big Bear’s Veterans Park for Steers’ memorial, as the nearby lake glittered and swallows weaved through blue skies. Recordings of the event have more than 53,000 views. More than a dozen speakers reflected on the multifaceted Steers, a biologist who was 73 when she succumbed to cancer in February: She took race car driving lessons, worked for NASA and, most notably, turned a pair of unassuming eagles into an international phenomenon.
Steers’ fierce defense of the local environment began long before its bald eagles became a digital sensation. She was a founding member of a nonprofit formed in 2001 to fight a housing development called Moon Camp. That nonprofit would become Friends of Big Bear Valley, which, all these years later, is fundraising to stop the same project.