Iconic Americans
In 1962 Rachel Carson published ‘Silent Spring’, accusing the chemical industry of deceiving the public and spreading misinformation about the long-term effects of DDT, a widely used insecticide at the time. Scientists were beginning to suspect a link between the insecticide and the decline of various bird species, in particular, America’s iconic national bird, the bald eagle.
Turns out, DDT interfered with the bird’s metabolism of calcium, causing the shells of their eggs to be so thin that they would break before a chick was fully developed. As a result, eagle numbers plummeted to the point of their being declared an endangered species by 1967.
Carson’s book would help start a movement that eventually resulted in a near total ban on DDT by 1972, a full decade after its publication.
When I was young in the 1960s and 1970s, bald eagles were nearly impossible to find in the wild. They had taken on a mythic quality, like some creature from another time. I was nearly thirty when I saw my first bald eagle in the wild on a raft trip in Wyoming. Like many others in the raft, I was awed by the size and majesty of the bird who looked down on us from its perch on a dead tree limb.
Today, eagles and many other raptors are on the rebound thanks to a ban on DDT and other sorts of cultural change, like ranchers and hunters not shooting them. Bald eagles in the wild are no longer such a rare sight and I’ve been lucky to have seen my share, like the nesting pair I photographed in a snag along the Willamette River in Oregon.
In the photo, it’s clear that one of the birds is larger than the other. From our human perspective, we might naturally think that the larger bird is male but we’d be wrong.
In the eagle world, it’s the female who does most of the hunting while the male typically keeps an eye on the nest and its contents. The energy required for this, plus the occasional extra portion of food taken on the fly, means females typically have around 25% larger body mass than males. In the photo, the eagle to the right is the female.
I returned to this spot regularly and would often glimpse the male perched in another tree, presumably near the nest, on my side of the river. He just sat there patiently watching and waiting until something caused him to take off. I waited with him and was fortunate enough to get a snap of him in flight.
It’s quite something to think that, in my lifetime, a creature so majestic and iconic could be brought back from the brink of extinction to thrive once again as an essential part of the American landscape. It happened because science drove the political will to make it happen. And it happened in far different times…
