A Natural (and Political and Cultural) History of America’s Bird

The fortunes of our (unofficial) nationwide chook fluctuated. Unique to North America, bald eagles made fierce, good-looking symbols for a brand new nation, but as precise birds they have been usually despised as thieves. They will, in truth, be proficient kleptoparasites, stealing fish from others, although scientists now take into account this an indication of intelligence, not ethical corruption. The as soon as widespread notion that they might snatch human kids — dramatized within the 1908 silent movie “Rescued From an Eagle’s Nest” — was false. Nonetheless, as predators, they have been shot, poisoned and strangled by the hundreds. They suffered habitat loss. The Bald Eagle Safety Act in 1940, and the banning of DDT within the early Seventies, have been important.

Among the many military of eagle champions Davis particulars, my favorites are the quirkier unknowns: individuals like Doris Mager, who took a movement illness tablet earlier than ascending to an unoccupied Florida eagle nest in 1979 for what was labeled not a sit-in however a weeklong “nest-in.” She raised consciousness of the bald eagle’s inhabitants in decline — by that time, the birds have been endangered in most states.

Davis additionally provides due credit score to the ornithologists and biologists who boosted egg manufacturing, with useful chickens conscripted to incubate additional bald eagle clutches, and tremendous glue to patch cracked shells when each egg counted. Younger wholesome eagles have been flown and pushed cross-country to repopulate habitat.

By the Eighties, “hack towers,” or synthetic nesting towers, wherein unseen human caretakers hand-reared the birds, have been in full swing. The eaglets raised in these applications did their finest, offering Davis with up-close dramas of little eagles rising up “utilizing their wings like crutches” to maneuver round, whereas their giant toes flop “out in entrance of them like clown sneakers.” One eaglet, No. 60, who failed a primary try at flight, crash-landed and needed to trudge again on the bottom to the house tower, “head down.”

Davis shines at most all the things on this exuberantly expansive guide, however particularly at highlighting particular person birds just like the translocated ones making their method on this planet. With eagle numbers now estimated at ranges they have been earlier than “America grew to become America,” their comeback is astonishing.