The Facebook Group Watching Centerport's Eagles Outnumbers the Town Itself

Stand on the footbridge at Mill Pond on almost any weekend morning this fall and you'll find at least one person with a lens longer than their forearm, waiting. They're not birdwatchers in the hobbyist sense. Most of them found this spot through a Facebook group, not a field guide.

That group, Bald Eagles of Centerport, has more than 32,000 members. Centerport's entire population, according to 2026 estimates, is 6,383. A hamlet that could fit inside a single Manhattan zip code has built an online following roughly five times its own headcount, and the thing holding it together isn't a business, a school district, or a civic association. It's the eagles nesting near the pond, a story that began in 2017 and has continued ever since.

That contrast is the actual story of Centerport's fall. Half a mile of Little Neck Road carries both the town's most scheduled institution and its least scheduled one, and this year both are running at full volume at the same time.

A nest that runs on its own clock

Rob Schwartz noticed the eagles first. He and his wife spotted a nest taking shape near their own backyard in 2017, close to what was then the Chalet Inn on Route 25A, and started a Facebook page mostly to keep track of what he was seeing. The page now tracks a lineage. The eagles nesting at Mill Pond have fledged 16 eaglets since 2017, cataloged not with names but with letters and numbers: C1 through C16.

The story took a hard turn in December 2022. The original male, known on the page simply as Dad, died on December 23. Wildlife rehabilitators Bobby Horvath and Cathy St. Pierre, working with the rescue group WINORR, determined through necropsy that the cause was avian flu. Three days later, on December 26, a new male the group designated D3 showed up near the nest. He spent the next two months fending off two rivals, D4 and D5, before settling in with the female by late February 2023. In 2024, after the pair fledged three more eaglets together, the group started calling him Dad2.

"Essentially, all these people live daily with them," Schwartz told CBS New York, describing a following that checks in on the birds the way people check sports scores.

The group has already confirmed its next public gathering: a Raptor Day scheduled for November 2026, though an exact date hasn't been set yet. Past editions have brought in live rescued raptors, including a bald eagle, a golden eagle, owls, and hawks, for a hands-on family event that has nothing to do with a printed museum schedule and everything to do with a story residents have been following in real time for nine years.

The museum a few doors up the same road

Walk or drive a short distance farther up Little Neck Road and the tone changes completely. The Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, at 180 Little Neck Road, runs on a calendar set months in advance, and this fall's lineup is dense enough that Suffolk County legislators introduced measures in April 2026 to fund more than $4.7 million in bond-backed stabilization and restoration work across the historic estate.

The public programming for fall 2026 includes:

Closer to Halloween, the museum also runs "Mr. Vanderbilt's Spooky Science Lab," a nighttime natural history tour through the darkened galleries that puts visitors face to face with bones, teeth, and specimens by flashlight. There's also a standing "Morning at the Museum" session built for visitors who want a quieter, less crowded version of the same estate.

None of this competes with the eagle story. It runs in parallel to it, on the same road, funded by the same county that also funds the harbor testing and maritime services that keep an eye on Mill Pond itself.

The pond everyone's already looking at

The two storylines share more than a street. They share water. Mill Pond House, the waterfront restaurant at 437 East Main Street, serves dinner looking out over the same pond where the eagles hunt, with a menu built around lobster bisque, baked clams, and sesame seared yellowfin tuna. Diners there are, in a literal sense, looking at the same surface the eaglets learned to fish in.

Back on Little Neck Road itself, Hometown Bakeshop at number 2 has been running since 2016, opened by childhood friends Luigi Aloe and Danna Abrhams, both of whom grew up a few towns over in Huntington. It's known locally for its egg sandwiches and biscuit-based "bagel bombs," and it sits close enough to the bridge that the same people who show up for the eagles often stop in before or after. A few doors down at number 6, Nicky's of Centerport serves dinner Tuesday through Sunday, giving the road a second reason to slow down once the sun starts setting earlier.

None of these businesses market themselves around the eagles. They don't need to. The road does that work on its own.

What actually holds this fall together

A museum with a printed calendar and a bond-funded restoration budget is one kind of institution. A pair of wild birds with no schedule, no admission fee, and a following larger than the town they live in is a different kind entirely. Centerport this fall has both, within walking distance of each other, and the second one draws a bigger crowd on any given Saturday than the first one does on its opening weekend.

When Raptor Day finally gets a confirmed date this November, it will be the only item on Centerport's fall calendar that started nine years ago as one resident noticing something unusual in his own backyard.

Lauryn Koke lives and works a few minutes from Mill Pond and keeps track of both calendars, the printed one and the unscheduled one. If you're curious what's coming next on Little Neck Road this season, or just want to talk about the corner of Centerport you already call home, reach out anytime.