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Chapman closed the bald eagle's county account in 1880 — "once quite common, now scarce" — and the modern record reopens it on two nests in one spring: 2015. Notre Dame's Linked Experimental Ecosystem Facility (ND-LEEF), in St. Patrick's County Park on the St. Joseph River, and Potato Creek State Park, in this township's own orbit at North Liberty, are together and repeatedly stated to be "the first successful bald eagle nests ever recorded in St. Joseph County." The particulars agree across tellings: a pair took over a red-tailed hawk's nest at ND-LEEF — the eagles arrived in 2014 on the Tribune's later telling, claimed the nest in spring 2015 — and Potato Creek's pair, after enhancing an osprey nest in 2012–2013 and building their own in 2014 without young, hatched three eaglets in spring 2015, announced by the DNR on 8 May 2015, "the first that eagles have produced offspring" in that park's 38-year history. An eagle cam followed at ND-LEEF in 2017, and the nest had produced 16 eaglets in 11 years when the Tribune counted in March 2026 — the pair still on the nest, three eggs spotted that season, one already broken on the later report. From zero recorded county nests in the whole of the county's written history to a webcammed institution in two years: that is the shape of this return, and its first-nest date is 2015 at both sites, printed with the 2014 arrival claims standing beside it, unmerged.
The osprey's county stronghold is the township's own park. The DNR's May 2015 release states it as a superlative: Potato Creek "has four nesting pairs of ospreys again this year, the highest concentration of any area in Indiana" — nesting eagles being outnumbered by nesting osprey about four to one statewide, the park inverted the state's ratio. The June 2015 county round-up concurs: four osprey nests at Potato Creek, one at St. Patrick's, another near Saint Mary's College, the bird then state-endangered in Indiana. Potato Creek's osprey platforms on Worster Lake are the nearest thing this section has to a dated raptor address inside Lincoln Township's own ground, and they print at that size: the densest osprey nesting ground in Indiana, in the state park five miles from Walkerton's main street.
The peregrine falcons are a county-frame return, and they print at county frame by the audit's own instruction. Peregrines first nested in downtown South Bend at the City-County / Tower Building site in 2003, on the Midwest Peregrine Society's Indiana nesting reports compiled from the DNR's John Castrale — a nest box placed on the Tower Building some nine years before a courting pair was photographed there in 2002, on the Tribune account. The site's counted course: 28 young produced by 2013, 49 chicks fledged through 2019, 55 through 2022, and 63 chicks fledged (2.74 per year) in the 2025 report, which carries the site as active 2003–2025, the 2025 pair raising five eggs' worth of young from a late-March laying. The June 2015 county round-up catches the institution mid-course — "the peregrine falcons in downtown South Bend are raising four chicks" the same spring the eagles and ospreys nested. Three raptors Chapman listed as scarce, gone or unlisted, nesting in one county in one spring, each return dated by its first nest: eagle 2015, osprey established at Potato Creek by the early 2010s with its densest-in-Indiana count in 2015, peregrine 2003.
Sources: Indiana DNR release, 8 May 2015 (Potato Creek eaglets; four osprey pairs, highest concentration in Indiana); University of Notre Dame / ND-LEEF accounts, 2015–2018, and South Bend Tribune, 4 June 2015 and March 2026 (first successful nests in county history; 16 eaglets in 11 years); Midwest Peregrine Society, Indiana Peregrine Falcon Nesting reports 2013, 2019, 2022, 2025 (South Bend first nesting attempted 2003; fledge totals by year). Closure: DUG.