It is so hard to shake what you learn as a child. For example, bald eagles: I know they aren’t endangered anymore, but when a young girl goes to Washington D.C. in 1976 and sees a bald eagle at the zoo and hears that there only a few of our nation’s symbols left, and she interprets that to mean there’s only this Eagle at the zoo and his immediate family somewhere in the back, that’s hard to shake.
We’ve gone Eagle watching in our area, but it was an hour drive, and of course there were no Bald Eagles. While they aren’t endangered, they’re rare, right? They’re a Special Occasion Eagle, like when you need to start the baseball season, or raise money for your nature habitat.
Gary called me Tuesday just after he left the house.
“A bald eagle just flew in front of my car.”
“Impossible,” I said. “Maybe it was some other kind of eagle.”
“It was a bald eagle. I almost saluted. It took off from the road ahead of me and flew up into a tree.”
I immediately did some research and not only was it a bald eagle, it is the season when bald eagles like to come to the nearby river, and they like to pick roadkill off the roads, and one of my friends just saw one a few streets over a few days back.
It was lucky that Gary didn’t run over it when it was in the road, because there’s be a hefty fine for that. Wait – no – that was back in the seventies. Or maybe not – someone was just in big trouble for shooting one. The laws regarding bald eagles seem very inconsistent.
2 responses to “Bald Eagle”
Here in Washington (state, not D.C.) there are bald eagles all over the place, including a pair that nest in a tree alongside the road I commute on. It still feels really special to see them and I’m always surprised. Maybe it’s a Midwest thing, I don’t recall ever seeing one when I was growing up in Nebraska.
Trisha – that must be amazing! We have wild turkeys everywhere, supposedly Ben Franklin’s nominee for official bird.