The bird we almost lost

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birds, eagles, bald eagles, natural history, american history

It is becoming easier again to see bald eagles. At present there are about 20,000 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states and a similar number in Alaska. Sixty years ago, there were just a few hundred at best, though perhaps Alaska had a few thousand.

In The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird, Jack E Davis chronicles the double fall and rise again of our national symbol. For a century or more, although people loved images of eagles, putting them on buttons and banners, they considered the actual bird a pest. Bald eagles were shot, poisoned, trapped, clubbed, and had their nesting trees chopped down. It was rumored that children could be their prey, even though no such case is known. An eagle can't even carry off a lamb or piglet, although sometimes one may kill one and partially consume it on the spot.

Protective legislation, hard-fought, in the early 1900's led to a partial recovery until chemistry intervened: chemical pesticides discovered after WWII, primarily DDT, came into use so indiscriminately that many bird species were decimated. Sometimes the pesticide killed them outright, but more frequently, their eggs were weakened and would be crushed during brooding. Birds of prey were particularly affected, because their prey animals were contaminated. Once this was learned, and Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a slow process of discovery and eventual legislation (more hard fighting) led to a second recovery, which is still going on.

I remember DDT. From 1953 to 1961 we lived in Utah, across the street from a farm and orchard. The farmer had a boy my age. He and I and other boys would climb into a cherry tree when the Bing cherries got ripe, before the pickers came, and gorge ourselves. The DDT was visible as a whitish residue. We'd wipe some of it off, but not all. It didn't bother us. We didn't learn until much later how it affected birds and particularly their eggs and young. The Clean Air and Clean Water acts, bans on DDT, and the formation of the EPA put an end to the use of DDT and its relatives.

Today's scourge, though not particularly of birds, is neonicotinoid pesticides. They are more specific to insects…ALL insects, and many of their relatives and other invertebrates including earthworms. That's a story for another day, but it is much of the story behind Colony Collapse Disorder among honeybees.

The book is big, more than 400 pages, full of details. The number of people who studied eagles and the numbers who mobilized to agitate for their protection is quite amazing. An elderly man learned to climb to their nests to band the eaglets and proved how migratory they are; later an elderly woman learned climbing to record their lives. Thousands more studied them, learned of them, and all the while the proportion of those who would rather shoot them with bullets than a camera reduced and reduced. In more recent years (20 or more) streaming video from eagle nests has shown the nation their daily habits. Bird-cams of all sorts are increasingly popular.

Today, eagles nest within a few miles of my home. In most states, if you live within a couple of miles of a river or lake (eagles mostly eat fish, but they'll take prairie dogs and squirrels also), you probably live within a couple of miles of at least one eagle nest, or aerie (or eyrie).

When I look up and see a big bird with a long wingspan, I check for dihedral wings (the slight "V" between them). Dihedral equals turkey vulture (or sometimes black vulture, around here), while a flat flying surface equals an eagle. We have a lot of vultures around here (they come into our yard at times, if a fox has left half a squirrel lying around). But once in a while, we see an eagle.

It takes quite a writer to write a large book that keeps a reader's interest. Jack Davis has the knack. I really enjoyed this book.