A winter’s tale
Updated: 2011-09-12 20:56:50
Celebrating the return of the bald eagle
In the Iowa winter, as the poet Robert Hass wrote, “a farmer’s dreams are narrow,” and autumn can inspire me with a kind of dread as I work in the garden that will soon be buried under snow. But this coming winter, as the river that runs past my window becomes a sluggish ice jam, something miraculous will happen: The bald eagles will return.
To anyone familiar with the birds primarily through American patriotic kitsch, the sight may not seem that moving. But after the bald eagle became our national symbol in 1782, Americans drove it to the brink of extinction. In 1973, two years before I was born, nature writer George Laycock chronicled the “impending disappearance of the bald eagle” in a book that details the manifold challenges facing the birds, from pollution to hunting to development. His book, Autumn of the Eagle, advocates change but reads more like a lament for a species that is already gone, complete with data charts showing the extirpation of the birds from the lower 48 states. From the 1930s to the 1960s, from west Texas to California, hunters developed the bizarre sport of aerial eagle hunting, killing thousands of eagles a year by blasting them with shotguns from the open windows of small planes.
The practice emerged as a response to sheep ranchers’ mistaken belief that the birds, which grow to nearly four feet long and have a seven-foot wingspan, could prey on young lambs, a myth akin to the persistent rumor that the birds snatch small children. But it developed into a uniquely American high-octane sport. One legendary hunter, John Casparis, bragged that he could kill 1,000 eagles a year by approaching them from behind, letting go of the controls and firing his sawed-off shotgun just before the craft stalled into a dive.
DDT was a far bigger threat. American farmers dumped thousands of tons of the insecticide on their crops each year in the 1950s and ’60s, before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring established the link to waning bird populations and helped launch the American environmental movement. As DDT made its way through the food chain in ever-more-concentrated doses, it caused eagle shells to become thin and eagle eggs sterile. Against fierce industrial opposition, the U.S. banned DDT in 1972 and the birds were protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. But as a child, I never saw an eagle that wasn’t in a zoo or on a dollar bill.
In Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, a character who has found a lost infant meets another who has just witnessed a death. “You have met with things dying,” he says, “and I with things newborn,” and the moment shifts the play from tragedy to comedy. The eagle’s return marks a similar narrative shift, a victory for those who spent their Januaries tramping around the frozen Midwest looking for the single eagle’s nest that remained in Iowa by 1977, holding out hope that the story could be changed if they could find and protect a viable egg. Even the most optimistic could never have predicted the resiliency of the birds and the ferocity of their comeback. In Iowa, environmentalists set a goal of 10 or 20 nests by 2010. But population growth took the U.S. Department of Wildlife by surprise. Last year, federal staffers lost count at 254 nests, nearly as many as once existed in the continental U.S. The birds left the Endangered Species List in 2007. This year, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources spotted 47 new eagle territories and stopped counting. Busloads of tourists now visit Iowa and Illinois in the winter—a trip that defies logic and comfort—to go on “eagle safaris” with leaders like Bob Motz. The retired biology teacher offers your money back if you don’t see eagles, “and I’ve never had to give it back,” he says. Indeed, although the birds face continuing threats from pollution, it must be easy money these days.
On a recent walk with my children, I lost track of how many eagles we saw fishing and nesting in trees. As one giant bird wheeled toward us and dove for fish, my daughter screamed, “Don’t eat me!” Then she returned to ignoring the bird. The lack of portentous symbolism the event held for her is a cause for celebration. For me, the eagle’s return is a scene of renewal at the time of the year that seems most barren and bleak, a reminder that a few dedicated people can change the narrative for a species or an ecosystem. For her, it’s a reason to look forward to January.
Issue: September 2011
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