A Grand Success
I did something this morning that the ten-year-old me could barely have imagined.
A Naturalist’s Notebook, Entry #2. No, the success isn’t mine. But I celebrate it heartily. Let’s look at Haliaeetus leucocephalus.
September 3, 2023.
As I sat this morning on the deck of a cabin on a small island a mile from shore in a lake in the far northern reaches of Minnesota, I watched a bald eagle perched high in a snag nearby. The bird didn’t give its audience of one as majestic a pose as in the photo above1, but I was impressed nonetheless. A mature bald eagle is a magnificent being. Close observation of a bald eagle in the wild is for me like joining a choir in singing Handel’s Messiah, an emotional near-riot of awe, joy, and exultation.
I am enthralled by wild things.
The child me liked horses, dogs, snakes, and crawdads. (Ten-year-old me pipes up: “I guess y’all call ‘em crayfish. Which I don’t mind, o’ course, but I don’t really get why some feel the need to correct me on what they’re called. Sure, they ain’t really daddies ‘cept for the male ones that do what’s needed to make little crawdads, I guess, but they sure as shootin’ ain’t fish, either, though our teacher, Mr. Butler, says they’ve got gills. Which he says crabs do, too, so it ain’t only fish what have gills. And as for the craw-cray thing, well, there ain’t no difference there worth going on about, far as I can tell.”)
Youngster me also liked watching Jim wrestle anacondas while Marlin Perkins watched from a boat, or track a lion through the bush while Marlin rode along in the Land Rover. Boa constrictors were interesting, but not as impressive as pythons. Oh, and back to horses: wild horses beat tame horses every which way. Case in point: the Black Stallion. Sharks and whales were super-cool; killer whales being of course the best. Polar bears and grizzlies, lions of every sort, and tigers. Oh, my, but did I like nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ or what!
My fascination with nature didn’t end with apex predators and charismatic megafauna, however. I collected butterflies, and, for a short while, beetles. I remember writing a report on monarch butterflies, complete with illustrations copied from a Petersen guide. Monarchs were cool, but common. Accomplished butterfly collectors like me were slightly grudging in acknowledgement of the coolness of monarchs, seeing that they were pretty much all over the place. Everyone who started a butterfly collection had a monarch in their possession pretty much on day one. The swallowtails were the Big Game for us pros. Black swallowtails especially. Oh, and a special note should be made of the viceroy butterfly, a close mimic of monarchs, and not nearly as common. The monarch in one’s collection became much more interesting when mounted in a case next to a viceroy, allowing the juvenile lepidopterist to go on about the differences and how nasty monarchs taste because they grow up eating milkweed, which was only called that ‘cause of the white sap, really sticky stuff and not at all milk, really. Anyway, milkweed plants were known to be toxic, and the chemicals that made ‘em so didn’t hurt the monarch caterpillars that munched the milkweed, just instead those chemicals made the birds that tried to eat monarchs puke and by that learn not to try that again. And that in turn protected the viceroy butterflies, ‘cause of course birds couldn’t very well tell ‘em apart any more than a non-lepidopterist human could.
Moths were fascinating, too. There were like zillions of different kinds, and they could go around in the dark finding flowers that stayed open all night and collect nectar and pollen, I guess to avoid the daytime rush of bees and butterflies. In school I learned that silk was made by caterpillars of the silkworm moth, which liked to feed on mulberry leaves. The coolest moths were the big ones, of course. The luna moth, kind of a huge, soft-green swallowtail of a moth with these big fluffy antennae, was for most of us the best. But when Todd one day brought in a cecropia moth his dad found in the yard—wow! For about a week, cecropia-moth-hunting and everything to do with cecropia moths was the rage amongst the entomologists of Boulder Bluff Elementary School. When we moved on, it was only because Roberta brought in a Venus fly-trap and showed us how the deadly plants literally had a hair-trigger mechanism they used to trap flies and such inside the pink-lined, specially-modified leaves that snapped shut when triggered not just once (‘cause a single trigger could be a false alarm), but twice. And then the plant digested the bug inside! A carnivorous plant, and it didn’t live in some far-off jungle, but here in the U.S.! Suddenly, the outdoors became even more exciting. (And so was Roberta, to some of us guys who discovered that girls could like outdoor stuff, too. She even liked snakes. But she’s a different story.)
If one is outdoors much, it’s hard not to notice birds. Pigeons, starlings, and sparrows met me in Times Square for lunch one Monday. Cardinals, chickadees, robins (more on those here), blue jays, and more visit our suburban backyard, along with a few others attracted by the natural garden area and pond—such as thrashers, catbirds, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks, and even owls. (Barred owls in particular frequent the space.) So, when I was still bumbling about in grade school, then middle school, and beyond, I also fell in love with birds. (And bees, but that, too, as one might suspect, is also another, different story.)
Birds are incredibly diverse, endowed with amazing traits and abilities, adaptable, and nearly ubiquitous. Ptarmigans can be found high in the Rockies; harpy eagles in the jungles of Brazil; white storks nest on rooftops in Portugal; pigeons, derided by some as “sewer falcons”, flourish in the midst of human cities; demoiselle cranes can be seen flying at 25,000 feet over the Himalayas during migration; emperor penguins can descend to depths of 1500 feet below the surface of the Antarctic waters they frequent; and the southern cassowary, the most dangerous bird in the world (according to the New York Times, Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, and the Guinness Book of World Records, so it must be true), lurks in darkened streets, alleys, and pretty much wherever else it wants, in Australia. (Yes, I know. It’s Australia. I think we just have to accept that most everything there is trying to kill us.)
I started my bird-watching with an old pair of binoculars, a Petersen guide, and as much traipsing through woods and fields as my parents, neighbors, and local authorities would allow. In woods along a swampy area in South Carolina I first saw a male indigo bunting, what looked like a sparrow electrified to a bright, iridescent blue. Near that same spot was my first encounter with an osprey, its bent-winged flight over the water still imprinted in my mind decades later. The mockingbird proved a delight—when I learned that Thomas Jefferson had mockingbirds as pets, and in a letter to a friend encouraged all to “venerate [the mockingbird] as a superior being”, I understood why. I learned the differences between cattle egrets and snowy egrets. The hanging-teardrop nests of Baltimore orioles fascinated me (and still do). Knowing that nuthatches like to clamber upside-down along tree trunks and branches made their identification easier. But the raptors—and especially, eagles—were royalty.
I would wade through brambles to see a hawk. Osprey, I suspected, were magical. That a particular species of small falcon was called a merlin delighted me; it’s close kin, the kestrel, is also a favorite. I am in awe of the peregrine. But there was the specter that haunted the back of my mind: the bald eagle. I would have climbed Kilimanjaro to see an eagle.
Two hundred forty-one years ago, the nascent United States chose the bald eagle as the national bird, with its establishment in 1782 on the Great Seal of the United States. Contrary to one of those myths that just won’t die, Franklin didn’t recommend the turkey be chosen; he did later lament the bald eagle as the choice, however, calling it lazy and “of bad moral character”. Franklin instead (and quite probably tongue-in-cheek, which would have been very much in character for Ben) suggested the wild turkey would have been a better choice, though even he admitted that the turkey was a “silly and vain” bird. Of greater relevance to the selection process, however, is that the initial design featured a golden eagle. Because the golden eagle is found nearly all over the world, however, the committee decided to go instead with the bald eagle, which is native only to North America.
Whether lazy or of dubious character, however, the bald eagle—large, powerful, imposing, distinctive and regal in appearance—proved a solid choice. The largest raptor of North America (edging out the golden eagle on weight alone, the two being of almost identical dimension otherwise), the bald eagle, called Falco leucocephalus by Linnaeus (later changed to Haliaeetus leucocephalus in order to separate them from the true falcons), is found from sea to shining sea (you had to know that was coming!) across the lower 48 states, and in Alaska as well, where, in accordance with Bergmann’s Rule2, they grow largest. Adult females average in all areas about 25% larger than adult males. Alaskan adults can weigh as much as 6-7 kg (females) and about 5 kg (males). In Florida, maximum weights top out at about 5.5 kg for females and 4-4.5 kg for males. Also, in fairness, let’s note: eagles mate for life. So, at least on the fidelity-to-one’s-mate scale, they score highly.
Eagles are also, like many raptors, relatively long-lived, with life spans well in excess of 20 years documented in the wild. They reach maturity at 4-5 years of age. Bald eagles are opportunistic carnivores; their genus name, Haliaeetus, translates approximately as sea-eagle, and thus it’s not surprising that they live near water, and that fish comprise much of their diet, but they’ll also eat small mammals, birds, carrion, even snakes and lizards on occasion.
A few years ago, on the very lake that’s right now just outside the cabin door, I witnessed an incident of their thievery that so exercised Mr. Franklin. Bald eagles are known to keep an eye on their fish eagle (osprey) cousins, and when spying an osprey in flight with a fish, an eagle will harass it in flight until the bullied, exasperated fish-catcher drops its fish; very often the eagle will catch it in flight, and make off with it to a convenient roost for lunch, dinner, or aprés-vol snack. I watched one morning while exactly this sort of thing took place. A coasting, soaring eagle was making circles in the sky when an osprey came on the scene from the south, a fish held long-wise under its body like a torpedo under the belly of a WWII torpedo bomber. The eagle banked toward the osprey, and immediately began buzzing and dive-bombing runs by the beleaguered fish-hawk. Unable to effectively evade or outrun the eagle, which was about twice its mass (more or less the standard ratio of body weights of the two species), the osprey eventually released the fish, to which the eagle turned sharply, grabbing it high in the air, and both continued on their way, one a dour victim, the other clearly of bad moral character, but with prospects of a full belly. The fish’s sentiments regarding the affair are not known.
Eagles were common across the continent when the American settlers rolled over it. Commonly cited estimates give numbers of mating pairs in the mid-19th century above 100,000, with the total number being on the far side of 300,000 bald eagles in the skies and high roosts of the fledgling nation; these numbers, however, are admittedly vague.
Popular myths amongst American settlers were such that many believed that eagles would take calves, dogs, sheep, chickens, and even young children. Seeing eagles preying on large dead animals by the side of the trail probably reinforced these false notions, and imagination, accompanied by real threats of every conceivable kind encountered in their difficult traverse of a strange new world, produced in settlers’ minds images of eagles not so much as noble representatives of freedom, but as raiding predators to be shot, trapped, poisoned, or bludgeoned on sight.
Bald eagles tend not to tolerate much human activity near their nesting and brood-raising. Habitat loss—everyone, eagles and humans alike, seems to like waterfront property—made a big dent in numbers, as did hunting, trapping, and even poisoning in some cases. Some locales offered bounties for eagle carcasses, attracting professional hunters. Although eagle feathers weren’t the most sought-after by the fashionable sort, the feather craze of the late 19th century prompted at least some eagle-hunting solely for their feathers. It has been estimated that at the beginning of the twentieth century the contiguous forty-eight states harbored only about a tenth of the number of eagles the nation’s lands had once seen, though again, solid numbers are hard to come by. One bit of trivia, though: There were no documented sightings of bald eagles in the State of Indiana from 1900 until 1988. Pretty clearly, things were not going well for eagles, even if we can only be sketchy with specifics.
The Lacey Act of 1900, followed by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916, provided some minimal level of protection for eagles, but not with much specificity or clear effect. Finally, in 1940, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act, which prohibited the taking of eagles of any age, by any means, and even the mere possession of feathers, talons, nests, wings, or other parts—with exception made for Native American tribes, for religious and ceremonial purposes.
While the Bald Eagle Protection Act prevented willful taking of eagles, it did nothing to protect eagles from incidental harm. Especially due to pesticides. At the time of publication of Rachel Carson’s earth-shaking Silent Spring, in 1962, in which she shared with the world some of the horrors we were inflicting upon nature, and even, ultimately, ourselves, the number of breeding pairs of eagles across the entire lower 48 states of the union—now determined through thorough counts and careful estimates—is thought to be about 417, with perhaps 1500 total3.
One of the major threats to bald eagles, being at the top of the food chain, where through the principle of trophic magnification long-lasting chemicals accumulate, was pesticides. DDT in particular was a culprit; it was found both to concentrate in raptors, and to interfere with successful egg-rearing. But also at fault was continued habitat destruction and poor environmental management.
Despite the uproar that ensued with the attention given Silent Spring and further accumulation of evidence that DDT had deleterious effects on wildlife beyond its efficacy as an insecticide, another decade passed before the US effectively banned the common, widespread use of DDT in 1972. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 opened the door for potential further, specific protections for bald eagles, and finally, in 1978, the bald eagle was listed under the ESA as endangered. This mandated clear and specific actions to be taken to support existing populations, protect habitat from development, and appropriately manage habitat to support eagle population growth.
Then occurred magic.
In the space of a decade, bald eagle populations rebounded from “on the brink” to “burgeoning”. In 1987, the species’ status under the ESA was changed from endangered to threatened. This was a statement of pride and satisfaction on the part of the EPA and others over the effectiveness of combined efforts via the ESA, changes in pesticide management, and other improvements in environmental management. The National Audubon Society, in its 2022 State of the Birds Report, stated, “Long-term trends of waterfowl [populations] show strong increases where investments in wetland conservation have improved conditions for birds.” An associated article celebrating 50 years of the Clean Water Act pointed to how it, too, along with the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, and others, including the ESA, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (golden eagles being added to the act a few years after its initial passage), and much stronger controls of pesticide use, produced circumstances and opportunity for recovery of birds associated with wetland habitats.
The bald eagle benefitted magnificently. Twenty years after having its status eased to merely “threatened”, in 2007 the national bird was removed from ESA protection, though other aids in support and protection, such as those noted above, remain in place. It’s now estimated that there are close to 100,000 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48, with more than 300,000 comprising the total population.
The first time I saw a bald eagle, it was perched atop a fence post in the Sandhills of western Nebraska. Not as far from water as it is possible to get, but it certainly wasn’t typical bald eagle habitat. The nearest water was probably about 250 feet directly below its talons, in the Ogallala aquifer, the underground water source that stretches from the Dakotas down into Texas, and which, in large measure, makes the High Plains habitable. Or at least a bit less inhospitable.
The eagle was a mature adult. The fencepost on which it stood was atop a hillock in the midst of undulating prairie. The twin tracks of a half-bald gravel road wound away to the west. A windmill stretched up about a hundred yards away, a little lower down the hill toward a draw to the south. Its spinning blades reached into a sky that was deepening blue, the sun well down its slide toward the horizon, and there wasn’t a cloud within a hundred miles. Wind ruffled the eagle’s feathers, augmenting its scruffy look.
I was transfixed. After some time, I became aware of my heart beating, and I took a breath. The eagle turned its head and gazed at me. The large, yellow, sharply hooked beak dominated its fierce look, the culmen joined to the skull above the eyes. Movement to the right—a meadowlark landing on a nearby fencepost. The contrast in size emphasized the simple massiveness of the eagle. It shifted its feet atop the wooden post and turned into the wind, that breeze that is a universal constant in that country. For a few moments the eagle stood and looked imperiously about, a queen surveying her terra regis. Before I was ready, she shook, then pushed up off the post; wings that were an instant earlier barely distinguishable brown foldings against the brown body became pennants stretching into the sky. I heard the first flaps, and would have sworn I felt the air pushed by as she took off, up and then arcing away, over the draw and the measly scrub oaks and chokecherry at its bottom, completing a turn to the west, then up over the sun, with slow, heavy wingbeats of a monarch in no hurry, yet somewhere to go. Up higher, and then soaring, wings stretched flat, the distal-most feathers spread like the fingers of a child with a hand out the car window, caressing the air racing past she flew. She flew.
Eagles were then, and especially there, rare. They have, with a little help from some friendly humans, made a grand, impressive comeback. In our national anthem, we sing of the “land of the free, and the home of the brave”. If that is what we are to be, there is no better bird to be our symbol. Let us remember what we had to do to save it, and why.
Morffew, Andrew, "File:About to Launch (26075320352).jpg," Wikimedia Commons,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:About_to_Launch_(26075320352).jpg&oldid=727196438 (accessed September 3, 2023). CC by 2.0 license
The eponymic rule named for and formulated by Carl Bergmann, a biologist who in 1847 described what has proved to be a common pattern: within a relatively narrow biologic clade (e.g., a genus, or, as later noted, across subspecies of a given species), species or populations living at higher latitudes tend to grow larger—that is, individuals of populations in areas where it gets colder are bigger, on average, than individuals of populations in areas where it is hotter. The generally accepted explanation is natural selection favoring, in colder areas, those of greater size (and thus lower surface area-to-mass ratio, which favors heat retention), and, in hotter areas, where heat dissipation is key, smaller size and higher surface-area-to-mass ratio is favored.
USFWS Bald Eagle Repport: From 417 Nesting Pairs in 1963 to 71,400 Today, referenced at The Columbia Basin Bulletin Fish and Wildlife News, https://cbbulletin.com/usfws-bald-eagle-report-from-417-nesting-pairs-in-1963-to-71400-pairs-today/ It is important to emphasize that this estimate of barely more than 400 breeding pairs covered only the lower 48 states. Alaska was, in a real sense, another world, and a long way off. There, eagles were never in danger of extirpation as they were in the lower 48. Also note: at the time of this writing, Sept. 3, 2023, the USFWS Bald Eagle Management Program online site is unavailable. Visiting the URL (https://www.fws.gov/program/eagle-management) finds this message: “The requested service is temporarily unavailable. It is either overloaded or under maintenance. Please try later.”
God this is beautiful, Perry
It brought me to tears
This is you
taking off as a writer
Before I was ready, she shook, then pushed up off the post; wings that were an instant earlier barely distinguishable brown foldings against the brown body became pennants stretching into the sky. I heard the first flaps, and would have sworn I felt the air pushed by as she took off, up and then arcing away, over the draw and the measly scrub oaks and chokecherry at its bottom, completing a turn to the west, then up over the sun, with slow, heavy wingbeats of a monarch in no hurry, yet somewhere to go. Up higher, and then soaring, wings stretched flat, the distal-most feathers spread like the fingers of a child with a hand out the car window, caressing the air racing past she flew. She flew.