Fly Like an Eagle

Stephen Colbert and I share something, other than a love of sarcasm -- a love of eagles. If you've watched his show, the intro has a giant animated eagle screeching as it flies towards the screen. I don't have anything like that here, unfortunately.

I get a huge thrill from seeing eagles, though, and it happens relatively often, living in the Pacific NW. It seems like I see a bald eagle at least once a month, usually when driving over or around Lake Washington, a weekly occurrence as I ferry Hutton to various appointments. I saw one yesterday as we were heading home from Hutton's "Friendship Group" at the UW, driving over the Lake Washington 520 floating bridge. The eagle landed on a light post on the bridge, and was just so amazing.

I guess my fascination with eagles comes from many aspects. There's the fact that they're our national bird (tough luck, turkey!), that my parents loved to listen to their namesake band (see this post for more on my youthful intro to The Eagles), but probably most from the fact that growing up, the love our our endangered national bird was indoctrinated into us in elementary school. By first grade, I was learning about how the eagle was endangered from DDT thinning their eggshells, and it really struck me as a young environmentalist, how screwed up the world was if our national bird was endangered because of the use of pesticides.

Of course, DDT was only part of it. Loss of habitat, and shootings and/or poisoning of eagles and their prey by humans were other causes. The Bald Eagle Act, passed in 1940 helped stop the deliberate killings. The banning of DDT in 1972 helped further the destruction of eagles. Though if you believe this story, DDT had nothing to do with the deaths of eagles. Huh. But, strangely enough, I don't believe anything that Faux News has to say. Cough, biased, cough.

Now that I'm an adult, I'm still a tree-hugger, and I still love eagles. The eagle population has recovered enough that it has now been moved from "endangered" to "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, and it could possibly be delisted from the Endangered Species List next year!

For your further eagle enjoyment, I found these web cams so you can watch eagles live! No, not those Eagles.