How Big Does A Bald Eagle Get – Jack Davis with Sarge the eagle, a flightless female who lives in Largo, Florida. Photo credit: Debbie Burns.
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How Big Does A Bald Eagle Get
The bald eagle was not the obvious choice to be our national emblem, but today it is widely recognized as a perfect symbol of American patriotism. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Davis, an environmental historian, has published a new book about the bird, its surprising past and its resilience — prompting Davis to call it an “environmental success story” we can learn from. Produced by Nicci Brown, Brooke Adams and James L. Sullivan. Original music by Daniel Townsend, a doctoral candidate in music composition in the College of the Arts.
The Regal Bald Eagle
Nicci Brown: Welcome to From Florida, where we share stories about the people, research and innovations happening at the University of Florida. I’m your host, Nicci Brown.
The bald eagle has been our national emblem since 1782 and is recognized as such throughout the world. But despite its familiarity, there is still much to learn about this majestic bird, and our guest today has the stories and other information that I suspect will both delight and surprise you.
Jack E. Davis is Professor of History and Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies. He is also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.” And he has a new book out this month, published by W. W. Norton, that is likely to be just as well received, “The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird.”
Nicci Brown: It’s wonderful to have you here. I’d love to start our conversation by having you read a short excerpt from the book, if you don’t mind.
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Jack Davis: Oh, sure. I would like to. Let me give you a little bit of background on this excerpt. This is 1979, and the population of bald eagles is threatened around the country, primarily the lower 48 states. And that’s the beginning of the recovery era, when there’s a movement going on to try to restore the population. And it is about one woman’s participation in that restoration. Her name is Doris Mager.
From the upper branches of a loblolly pine, a large finger-overlapping arrangement of sticks hurled out the familiar aesthetic of a pair of industrious eagles. For some unknown reason, the pair had not returned for the nesting season of 1979. Looking up, Doris Mager was aware of the centrality of nests in the lives of bald eagles. These compositions of careful work, puzzles of intricacies, and strength that unite art with utility are essential to the renewal of life. The identity of those few birds is as closely tied to their nest as the bald eagles are to it. No one in North America builds bigger or stronger. The bald ones are emblematic of the resilience of their species. Nests have been a key variable in determining population decline, and they would be imperative to the revival. Without them, Mager knew, there would be no birds.
Mager was aware of the violent spontaneous weather that also frequented central Florida, and presently dark clouds filled the sky to the west. Standing at the foot of the loblolly, one hand hesitating on a climbing ladder hanging down from the height of a fire lookout tower, she was intent on spending time in the birth of the former residents. Mager had never shaken a tree before, much less in a storm. She reached out and touched an ominous looking lightning bolt running down the tree trunk to the ground. Pushing ahead of the storm, the wind pulsed and the green needles quivered in the branches high above. An eyewitness described the tree as “cobweb”. Another called it “wind-whipped”.
Jeff Klinkenberg, outdoor editor for the St. Petersburg Times, is the one who used the word “spindly”. “Here she was,” he thought decades later, “fifty-three years old, climbing a ladder I wouldn’t have dared climb at my age then, thirty.”
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Before Mager surrendered to the mercy of the swelling wind, Mager tied a red bandana around her head of silver hair, which she had cut and styled into a new hairstyle for the occasion. Owl earrings dangled next to her cheeks and, keeping with the raptor theme, a necklace of scattered eagles encircled her neck.
She wore black jeans, a denim shirt and gray running shoes. Still, her jogging routine had been inconsistent lately. Regarding that detail, she admitted to Klinkenberg, “I have fat little legs, and I probably shouldn’t be so far off the ground at my age.”
She slipped into a safety harness attached to an upper branch. Next to the harness line, the ground cable from a lightning rod was chased down the side of the tree. A number of precautions were taken that day, and Mager added one of his own by swallowing a motion sickness pill. “I get airsick, and I get seasick,” she confessed again to Klinkenberg, “and I’ll probably get seasick.”
Mager put one foot on a lower step and followed it with the other on the next step. Grasping a third at eye level with both hands, she stared nervously into the tree’s rust-colored, scaly bark and coaxed herself toward a fifty-foot top. Every time the wind blew, the tree creaked like an old door. When it swung like one, she paused, grabbed the ladder and took a deep breath. She called to a friend below, “Get down on your knees and pray, Viola.”
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Nicci Brown: That’s dedication for you. So she was drawn by the birds to do this, I suppose, to bring attention to what happened to the eagles.
Jack Davis: That’s absolutely right. She was with the Florida Audubon Society, and she had started a raptor rehabilitation center there, which was really in her backyard. And she tried to raise money to build an aviary at the headquarters of the Florida Audubon Society. And it succeeded with the help of others.
Nicci Brown: Okay. So what drew you to the bald eagle? We have her story. I suppose you don’t want to climb trees or do you?
Jack Davis: You know, I wouldn’t mind. What I didn’t read in here is her view from the top and how spectacular it was and I would love to see the view that the bald eagles have from their nests. They build their nests in the tops of tall trees, usually the tallest in the area, because they want to have a good view of their territory. They also want to see the water around them where the fish are. It is their primary food source.
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But what drew me to the book is that I am an environmental writer. As you said, I’m an environmental historian, and generally when we reflect on our environmental past, we tend to focus on the grim and tragic, and I think readers get a little overwhelmed by that. So I wanted to write an environmental success story, and this is a truly spectacular story. It has its tragedies. It has its dark moments. But at the end of the day, it’s this wonderful story about the bird and its relationship with us and how we’ve changed. The bird hasn’t changed, but we have.
Nicci Brown: And the eagle appears on the Great Seal of the United States. So do you know how it came to be selected? Because it has been a journey together in many ways.
Jack Davis: It’s been a journey. And of course, as you read, it is in my subtitle. And yes, I do. I devote a whole chapter to how the bald eagle came to be on the Great Seal of the United States. The development of a seal during the Revolution, after America declared its independence and fought for it, greatly needed a national identification on the world stage. And of course it would be a seal or a coat of arms. And it took three committees, 14 delegates in Congress along with some consultants and artists, and more, more proposals and six years to finally arrive at the right seal.
The bald eagle was only at the very end. It was proposed by Charles Thompson, who was the secretary of the Continental Congress and really the most powerful man in the Congress. And I think he was really a little tired of all these committees coming up with nothing. And so he took it upon himself to design the seal. Bald eagles were all over, this is in Philadelphia, and they were all over the eastern seaboard, very visible all the time. So all he had to do was look out his window or walk down the street and he would have seen a bald eagle.
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And eagles had long been, not bald eagles, but eagles, had long been a part of national heraldry going back to the ancients. But the bald eagle is one
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