The Quad Cities are an Eagle Magnet
When I saw the listing of today’s holidays, one immediately spoke to me, National Save the Eagles Day. I already wrote about National Bird Day back on January 5th, but eagles are probably my favorite bird, and it’s always a thrill when I see one. I’ve been watching them since third grade.
This one is a topic I know pretty well, we have several breeding pairs of eagles in the Quad Cities.1 I’ve also found some areas where large number of eagles frequent, so eagle watching has become a favorite winter activity.
Admittedly, some years are better than others, with the deciding factor being the weather. Eagles are not a gregarious bird, they aren’t found in flocks. Usually they spread out across an area to access local food2 the best they can, I think the eagles prefer to be distributed across the land. When temps start getting cold and colder, when the rivers have frozen over, when hunting and foraging opportunities are limited, that’s when I know where the eagles will be found.
When my Mom was alive, going down to the Mississippi River to see eagles was probably her favorite winter activity. Every weekend we’d head down to the river, usually with a Subway sandwich, to lunch with the eagles. As long as the river was frozen over, eagles would be found, usually in good numbers.
Remembering the Days Before National Save the Eagles Day
Seeing eagles wasn’t always such an easy thing to do. Eagle populations were threatened by loss of habitat, poaching, and pesticides. In 1972 they were the very first species to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, and that was also the first year my family lived in the Mississippi river valley near Davenport, Iowa.
Seeing just a single eagle was a thrill in those days. DDT and other pesticides concentrated in the apex predators at the top of the food chain. To explain in simple terms lets say DDT was being used to control a pest, a kind of insect. The insect caused losses to our crops, so we sprayed with DDT, the new wonder pesticide, hoping to prevent the destruction of food. Simple, right?
Sadly, not so simple. If you use a pesticide on a crop, it will kill many insects, those you targeted, along with any other hapless insect who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. A good number of the pest insects, sickened and dying from being exposed to DDT, along with any insect in the right place at the wrong time, are blown into a nearby stream. Fish gorge on the feast of dying insects.
Because a fish will eat a large number of those insects, a chemical like DDT will concentrate in it’s tissues over time. Then the eagles catch fish with high concentrations of DDT, and the eagle eats a good number of those fish. Do you see how the food chain causes chemicals like DDT to concentrate in apex predators at the top of the food chain? Golden and Bald Eagles are both apex predators.
When DDT concentrates in Eagles at the top of the food chain, there are a myriad of negative consequences. The biggest problem? The pesticide can cause egg shells to be so thin that the Bald Eagles and Golden Eagles of North America could not reproduce.
Broken eggs hatch no eagles…
Without National Save the Eagles Day?
When man’s use of the pesticide DDT continued despite warnings, golden and bald eagles became more and more rare, until there was a sole single breeding pair of bald eagles, Ozzie and Harriet. Sadly, all of their attempts to produce heirs failed, and the last living breeding pair of eagles died, producing no offspring.
I made that up, the part about the “last breeding pair of eagles died producing no offspring.”
It’s meant as an example of what the inevitable consequence of the continued use of DDT would have been. Thank goodness the Endangered Species Act helped the eagles avoid extinction.
Hopefully you don’t need the reminder, but here it is – Extinction is forever!
Can you imagine the entire spectrum of birds of prey suddenly gone? Eagles, Falcons, Hawks, and Osprey, all of them gone? Our skies would never be the same again. And neither would we.
A Little Reality Check – National Save the Eagles Day
Let’s be honest, National Save the Eagles Day is not what saved the birds. Eagles were taken off of the endangered species list in 2007. National Save the Bald Eagle Day wasn’t created until 2015, when the Bergen County Audubon Society (New Jersey) started the tradition of honoring the day.
So, we’ve got a holiday about saving birds that were already saved. I suppose that makes sense if you are from New Jersey, but that ain’t gonna fly around here…
I’ll have another opportunity to visit an event later this winter, “Bald Eagles Days>
- Rock Island IL, Moline IL, Davenport IA, Bettendorf IA ↩︎
- Eagles eat mostly fish, but have been know to also eat sea birds and ducks or hunt over grasslands and marshes for small mammals such as rabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs and muskrats ↩︎
