Bald eagle soars thanks to science and more
- John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
- April 25, 2023
- 561
Way back in the late 1980s, I told my girlfriend we were going on a little drive to see something special she’d never seen before — a mystery destination with a secret surprise waiting at the end. That girl must have really trusted me.
The reason I didn’t tell her where we were headed or what we were hoping to see was simple: I had never even seen a bald eagle myself, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could even find one. After all, there were only four bald eagle nests in the entire state of Ohio back then, and the odds of spotting one of the mythically rare birds were slim at best. My fallback plan was to point out an egret or some fancy gull or warbler because I was pretty sure she had never seen any of those things either.
Kristin and I each saw our first bald eagle that day, and I ultimately proved to be entirely worthy of her trust. We were married the following spring, and now, 35 years later, we can find an eagle within a mile of our house pretty much any day of the year.
As kids born in the 1960s, most of the wildlife we watched every Sunday night on Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” seemed as far off, mysterious and inaccessible as the moon. Sure we could go to the zoo and see a zebra or lion, but zoos weren’t terribly strong on endangered native wildlife.
Even if a zoo had an inkling to display a bald eagle, simply finding one alive would have been a problem. It’s not like folks were fluffing them with their cars on local roads. (And speaking of car versus wildlife accidents, if someone had hit a white-tailed deer in Ohio back in the 1960s, it would have made the local newspaper.)
Sure we had tons of robins, sparrows and blackbirds of varying sorts, but no one even dreamed of seeing an actual bald eagle out in the wild.
What had brought us to that point — the regional absence of many species and the brink of extinction for others — had been a succession of tragically consequential human actions over the course of the previous two centuries, beginning with the earliest of pioneers.
For early settlers moving into the territory north and west of the Ohio River, the mission was straight forward: tame the wilderness or die trying. The recipe for success was simply to kill the things that were capable of killing you, your family or your livestock. Right along with the large predators — wolf, bear and cougar, birds of prey — the hawks, owls and eagles fell in response to that motto. Settlers chopped trees, drained wetlands, and shot, trapped, clubbed and butchered wildlife with impunity. It was civilization versus the wild.
The advent of the Industrial Revolution amplified these actions, and the Victorian Era that followed saw the relentless destruction of wildlife for nothing more than the sake of fashion. The millinery trade (fancy women’s hats) wiped out entire species of birds around the world. Then came the chemical revolution of the 20th century — an enormous boon to mankind and his ability to conquer pestilence and grow food. But that new and strange chemistry came with a huge, largely unnoticed — or perhaps simply unacknowledged — downside.
Even when researchers began to connect the dots between the use of chemical pesticides and declines in wildlife of all sorts, outside of science the consequences were either largely ignored or systematically hidden. Then the Cuyahoga River caught fire — and the world woke up.
That’s an over-simplistic explanation for the start of the environmental movement, but the “burning river” was the point of inflection — the literal “flashpoint” if you’ll pardon the pun — that brought the damage we were doing to our home — the only place in the entire universe known to contain life — broadly into focus.
As we celebrate Earth Day this weekend, get yourself out and about and find yourself a bald eagle. The odds are in your favor as over 850 nests now dot the landscape across 85 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
If you have comments on this column or questions about the natural world, write The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email jlorson@alonovus.com. You also can follow along on Instagram @railtrailnaturalist.