Eagles, Big and Small

Many years ago, more than 25!, I became a regular volunteer at our Museum of Natural History, which was involved in an eagle hatching project.  At that time, eagles had almost vanished from our state, and the state DNR was trying to mate captive eagles, hatch the eggs in captivity, and then move the little ones to the nests of wild pairs.

It was an involved project!  Most of the details have faded from memory, but I do recall the first year that the Museum had an eagle who produced a chick who then moved, with the assistance of state officials, to a wildlife refuge-area nest.  The parents would be quite willing to accept the eaglet; the trick was making sure that the chick never saw the humans who were feeding it, so that it would not bond to the wrong species.  It bonded to a giant eagle-head glove and successfully made the transition to the wild.

Somewhere around here is a picture of me in the office of the museum guy in charge of the project, holding a tiny eaglet in my hands. 

In fact, I just remembered precisely what that picture looks like and where it is:  I was pregnant with my twins, so it was taken almost exactly 21 years ago!

No wonder I feel an affinity with eagle mothers.

Over the years, we have seen eagles here and there.  There are a few more nesting pairs around now, and you can find them if you know where to look.  I used to watch some in a distant but no doubt huge nest across the Matanzas River south of St. Augustine.  Every once in awhile in Florida an eagle will speed overhead when you're on the highway.

My birding has been considerably constrained in the past few years.  I did go out with a friend to see some eagles about a year ago, and maybe we need to do that again soon.  In the meantime, I am thoroughly enjoying the arrivals of the Blackwater eaglets, who are reminding me several times a day that there is a vast world beyond mine in the city.

I've quoted Henry Beston before but, as eaglets and great horned owls begin to hatch, as hawks soar in their mating dances, and as passerines and shorebirds in South America begin to feel the internal restlessness that will soon propel them northward, it's time again:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.   And therein do we err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
The Outermost House