eagle.in.flight.wings.up
Christmas afternoon and with the weather warm as springtime, I stepped onto the rear deck of my home and stood beside my niece, who was casually scrolling her phone. She glanced up, smiled and returned to her phone.
I scanned a patch of timber to the south and in the brilliant winter sunshine spotted the unmistakable glint from the white head of a bald eagle. Once spotted, it stood out like a beacon.
It’s not uncommon to spot an eagle on a winter afternoon, but I rarely see one from my backyard.
“Look!” I said in an excited whisper. “It’s an eagle!”
She looked up, more, I suspect, to satisfy her uncle than out of any real interest or curiosity.
“That’s nice,” she said, again smiling sweetly. Then she returned to her phone and walked into the house.
This young lady has a keen interest in wildlife, but her casual interest in the national bird is somewhat understandable. She grew up with an abundance of eagles. That was not always the case.
On June 20, 1782, when the Continental Congress adopted the Great Seal of the United States, the bald eagle, which is featured prominently on the obverse side of the seal fiercely clutching an olive branch with 13 leaves in one talon and 13 arrows in the other, became the country’s national symbol.
(It didn’t become the national bird until 2024, when President Joe Biden signed legislation signifying it as such.)
When the bald eagle had its image plastered on the Great Seal, there were an estimated 100,000 nesting eagles in the United States, then a smattering of 13 states strung along the Eastern Seaboard and covering about 430,000 square miles. The estimated number of eagles filling that landscape is little more than a guess, but it’s fair to say that in colonial America, eagles were plentiful.
Fast forward to 1963, when many who are reading this (including me) were alive. According to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the number of nesting bald eagles in the contiguous U.S.—by then a 3.12-million-square-mile coast-to-coast swath—had dwindled to 417. The number of eagles in Kentucky, if there were any, could almost certainly have been counted on one hand. The big birds were on the way out.
Eagle numbers had been plunging for decades, victims of—among other outrages—habitat destruction, pollution and the free-range killing of the birds. It was enough to alarm even politicians, who had afforded the national symbol some legal protection a few years earlier with passage of the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940. (Golden eagles were added in 1962, and the law, still in force, became the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.)
However, the almost unregulated and widespread use of pesticides following the Second World War did the most damage, with dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) usually identified as the primary culprit. Thanks in large part to the work of Rachel Carson and her groundbreaking book Silent Spring, published in 1962 (two years before the author’s death at age 56 from breast cancer), public awareness increased, and eventually, the government acted. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, and two years later—a decade after the publication of Silent Spring—DDT was banned for general use in the United States. (It was banned worldwide for agricultural use by the 2001 Stockholm Convention, a ruling that took effect in 2004.)
Eagle recovery was at first slow and steady but then skyrocketed, both nationwide and in Kentucky. No one knows precisely how many wintering eagles Kentucky attracts today, but numbers are strong, evidenced by the known number of eagles that nest in the state. According to the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, in 1986, there was one known bald eagle “nesting territory” in Kentucky. In 2019, there were 187. As of August 2023, 95 of Kentucky’s 120 counties were known to be home to as least one bald eagle nest. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that in 2007, the number of know nesting pairs of eagles in the contiguous U.S. was “at least” 9,789. By 2019, it has swelled to 71,467 nesting pairs and 316,700 individual birds.
Winter is the best time for eagle watching. Look for the big birds near Kentucky’s numerous lakes and other bodies of water. They are most prevalent in the western part of the state. Get out and enjoy them.
The vast majority of Kentucky’s wintering eagles are bald eagles, but each year, a few golden eagles are reported, including a female bird that researchers at the Bernheim Forest and Arboretum in Bullitt County have named Athena and have been tracking since 2019. As of press time, Athena had returned to Bernheim. For more details, go to bernheim.org.
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For more eagle information, check the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources’ eagle page at fw.ky.gov/Wildlife/Pages/Bald-Eagles.aspx, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at fws.gov/species/bald-eagle-haliaeetus-leucocephalus, the U.S. Geological Survey at usgs.gov and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at allaboutbirds.org/guide/Bald_Eagle/id.
Readers may contact Gary Garth at editor@kentuckymonthly.com.