On Sunday, February 22, neighbors gathered at the corner of McGilvra Blvd E and 39th Ave E believing the fight was already over. Julie Tokashiki Skerritt had organized a small blessing for a roughly 100 foot redwood everyone assumed would be cut within days. Her husband, the actor Tom Skerritt, stood with the group as Ken Workman, a descendant of Chief Seattle, offered a few words.
Four days later, on Thursday morning, a tree crew arrived to do exactly what the gathering had been mourning. They left without cutting a single branch. A pair of bald eagles had flown in and landed in the upper branches just as the crew set up, and the workers backed off rather than risk violating federal wildlife protections. For a week and a half, it looked like the eagles might have accomplished what a permit process, a city designation, and a neighborhood campaign could not.
They hadn't. On March 6, 2026, the redwood came down.
If you live in Madison Park, you probably already know this story in outline. What's worth understanding now, months later, is why the outcome went the way it did, because the reasoning exposes something about how "protected" land actually works here that most of us get backwards.
The lot everyone assumed was safe
The property at 700 McGilvra Blvd E sits on a steep, spring fed slope holding six mature redwoods and an understory the city itself had flagged as sensitive. The parcel carries an Environmentally Critical Area designation, the kind of label that sounds, to most homeowners, like the strongest protection Seattle can hand a piece of land. Owner David Shearer had received a permit to remove one of the six redwoods to build a retaining wall ahead of a second home on the subdivided lot. He told KOMO News he spent 18 months with arborists and structural engineers narrowing the plan from four affected redwoods down to one, and that the existing property still carried 92 percent tree canopy cover, well above most surrounding lots.
Neighbors weren't arguing the numbers so much as the assumption underneath them. Tree Action Seattle, the volunteer group that had listed the McGilvra grove as "at risk," argued the redwoods depended on a network of underground streams and that the grove functioned as one interconnected system rather than six separate trees. As advocate Sandy Shettler put it to reporters, "the trees are all interconnected." Remove one, the concern went, and the rest of the grove would decline even if it technically stayed standing.
Here's the part that surprised people who'd assumed ECA status was a shield: Seattle's own tree protection code, Chapter 25.11 of the municipal code, exempts tree work within an Environmentally Critical Area from most of its standard requirements whenever a separate tree and vegetation management plan is required under a different code section. The ECA label doesn't stack an extra layer of tree protection on top of the regular tiered system. In a meaningful number of cases, it routes the property into a different, narrower review track altogether. A designation that reads as "more protected" on a zoning map can function, procedurally, as "differently regulated."
What the eagle actually bought
The second assumption that didn't hold was about the eagles themselves. Once the birds were spotted and video circulated showing them roosting in the upper branches, it was easy to believe federal wildlife law had effectively frozen the project. It hadn't, not automatically. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson later clarified to KOMO News that not every tree a bald eagle perches on carries protection under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The law's teeth are aimed at activity that would disturb an active nest or injure a bird, and the agency recommends a disturbance permit specifically when removal is likely to disturb eagles nesting within 660 feet. Shearer applied for that permit and received it. The pause in February bought the tree a few more weeks. It did not buy it survival.
For a neighborhood built partly on the assumption that its natural features come with durable guardrails, that's a distinction worth sitting with. The eagles were real. The roosting was documented on video. None of that converted into the kind of protection most of us assumed it would.
Why one lot became a citywide argument
The McGilvra fight landed at a moment when Seattle's tree canopy numbers were already under scrutiny. Two thirds of the city's urban forest grows on private residential land, not in parks. Tree Action Seattle's own analysis found that even if every inch of public land in Seattle were packed with trees, the city would top out around 18 percent canopy coverage, well short of the 30 percent goal officials have set for 2037. In 2024 alone, more than 2,000 trees came down citywide, with construction as the single largest driver, and advocates note that most of those removed trees sat on the edges of lots already built out, not in the middle of a buildable footprint.
That context is what turned a private dispute on a hillside street into something residents kept talking about for weeks. It also explains why Councilmember Maritza Rivera's amendments to the tree code, which give developers more flexibility by shrinking required tree protection areas, drew as much attention from Madison Park neighbors as the redwood itself did. The rules governing a single 17,000 square foot hillside lot on McGilvra are, in practice, the same rules being debated at the scale of the whole city.
Before the tree came down, a coalition of 35 families in the area tried a different lever entirely: reaching out about purchasing the property or establishing a conservation easement rather than relying on the permit process to stop it. That effort didn't change the outcome here, but it's a useful data point for anyone paying attention to how these disputes eventually get resolved when regulation alone doesn't hold.
What's still standing, and what to watch
Five redwoods remain on the McGilvra lot. Tree Action Seattle has kept the grove on its active campaigns list, framing the removal as a reason to press for changes to how Seattle measures and enforces canopy protection rather than a closed case. Whether the remaining root systems and underground springs hold up once construction on the new house begins is the kind of question that won't have an answer for a year or two, and it's one worth watching if you live anywhere near a similarly steep, spring fed lot in the neighborhood. Madison Park and Broadmoor share more of that hillside geology than most residents think about day to day.
The broader lesson isn't that Seattle's environmental rules are toothless. It's that the labels attached to a property, whether that's an ECA designation, a heritage tree listing, or a documented eagle roost, describe a process more than a guarantee. Understanding which process applies, and what it actually requires versus what it sounds like it requires, is the difference between being surprised by an outcome and seeing it coming.
If you're weighing a project on a slope lot, evaluating a property near one of Madison Park's environmentally critical parcels, or just trying to understand what protections actually apply to a piece of land you already own, the Hinds Team WA has spent decades untangling exactly this kind of neighborhood specific detail alongside the families who live here. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer instead of a guess.
