A couple of weeks ago I was walking trails in the Spencer Crest Nature Center at Corning Community College, and stopped to watch a hawk spiraling upward above me. Moments later the hawk swooped downward after a bald eagle passing by, and pestered it out of sight.
The next day I was stopped at the Washington Square traffic light in Bath, looking southward along Liberty Street. In the distance, out of the village, past the Conhocton, under Mossy Bank, an eagle rose spiraling into the sky, gained altitude, then glided off eastward just above the ridge.
I was well into my thirties before I saw my first eagle, soaring past almost in arm’s length at Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, where my family and I spent many happy hours. I had been in my twenties when I first saw an osprey, a great bird with a wingspan almost matching an eagle’s, and like the eagle a bird whose favored prey is fish.
Both, as I grew up, were rarities plunging toward extinction, partly due to habitat devastation and partly due to massive overuse of DDT – a persistent broad-spectrum pesticide that collects in fish, then builds up in these great birds that eat the fish, thinning out their eggshells so that scarcely any stay intact long enough to hatch.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring went a long way toward alerting us to this tragedy, and provoking change. By the way, in certain circles there’s a propaganda that Rachel Carson was an anti-business fanatic with the blood of millions of malaria victims on her hand, because she inspired the banning of DDT. But Carson, a rare woman scientist of her day, never called for banning DDT, and in fact it isn’t banned. She called for using it more narrowly and more wisely, so that we would no longer have, for example, children walking to and from school in clouds of the stuff being laid down from airplanes, and being told it was perfectly harmless. It wasn’t.
In the late ‘eighties I was a volunteer field researcher for the Pennsylvania Atlas of Breeding Birds. Over a seven-year period we confirmed a total of seven breeding eagle pairs for the entire commonwealth. That same study for the same period found eight active osprey nests in Pennsylvania, although some may have been used in more than one year.
Much has gotten worse environmentally in the 25 years since then, but eagles and ospreys are doing better. I wouldn’t be surprised if our immediate area had as many breeding eagles and ospreys today as all of Pennsylvania had back then. One site in Bath has an eagle nest and an osprey nest within sight of each other, although the osprey aren’t using theirs this year – one may have died. Steuben County, with its waters, cliffs, and extensive forests, is currently a growth area for nesting bald eagles.
These are BIG creatures. A bald eagle’s wing span can reach 90 inches, whereas an osprey must be satisfied with a “mere” six feet. The turkey vulture is our only other hawk-like bird in their league. Of these three, the osprey is the most streamlined, the eagle the most robust, with massive beak and talons.
Both of these marvelous birds, as we say, love to feed on fish. The noble eagle actually specializes in picking up carrion. The osprey (formerly called fish hawk) is a more aggressive hunter. What a sight it is to see a huge osprey plunge from a height into a lake or stream, disappear for a few seconds, and then suddenly fly up out of the water into the sky, bearing in its talons an utterly bewildered fish. Once while canoeing on the Delaware I got to see what I’d only read about before – a flying osprey fiddling its fish from talon to talon until he got it facing head into the line of flight. This seems like a waste of attention and energy, but I suppose it’s more aerodynamic that way.
Once they were hunted out as vermin, but today it’s illegal (and rightly so) to harm these marvelous birds, to keep one, or to possess even a feather, with certain exceptions for rehabilitators and for ceremonial use by Native Americans. We are honored to have the eagle and the osprey as new-immigrant neighbors. Keep your eye peeled for a sight of them.