The Dance of Eagles
by Cynthia Owen Philip

The first eagle that truly grabbed my psyche was the lectern in the Episcopal church where I sang in the junior choir with a bunch of buddies. I must have been eight or nine. The eagle's wings were half folded and on his back he bore a very large New Testament. (I later learned that the eagle is a symbol of the resurrection and of St. John the Evangelist—a deft folding together of the pagan and Christian.) When the ritual was about to lull me to sleep, that eagle fixed me with his imperial eye and—Snap!—I was all attention. My rampant childhood imagination turned this phenomenon into a teasing game. I would lower my eyelids slowly just to see if I'd get caught. Just before they closed, bang! his eye threw a thunderbolt.

A couple of years later when I was in my ancient Greece phase I found out about that thunderbolt. The eagle was Zeus's alter ego, and the only bird to inhabit the abode of the gods. Myth tells us how Zeus transformed himself into an eagle when he seduced Ganymede and bore him to Mount Olympus to be the gods' cupbearer. Later, the body of Alexander the Great was carried off to the Elysian Fields on the back of an eagle. So powerful was the identification of the eagle with conquering powers that it became the heraldic device of the Romans, and who knows how many family crests.

In 1782 our founding fathers chose the bald eagle as our national emblem because it was so perfect an example of freedom and independence; I imagine they also appreciated the majesty conveyed by its ancient symbolism. The dark brown homespun suit President Washington wore at his inauguration sported eagle buttons. The eagle is featured on the president's flag and is embedded in the floor of the White House entrance. The eagle embellished our gold coins. It still adorns most of our quarters.

Apparently the only founding father who opposed the choice was that practical old codger, Benjamin Franklin, who favored the wild turkey, an intelligent and quick bird of laudable domestic habits that was native to our land. The eagle by contrast, complained Ben to his daughter, "is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk, and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him."

Encounters by Choice and Chance
For some years, as many of my neighbors buzzed excitedly about the bald eagle's wonderful comeback from virtual extinction along the river, I've thought it high time for me to find out more about this great wonder. The lamentable fact was I had never seen a live one, not even in a zoo. I quickly took care of that by buying a ticket for the New Baltimore Conservancy's annual eagle watch. We set off aboard a triple-decked boat loaded with eager birders. Heading south on the river, we saw a plethora of herons and gulls. Someone cried: "There's one." Then: "There's another." Soaring high up, powerful, majestic and totally in control of the blue empyrean, the eagles were magnificent. Soon we sighted another pair. These careened across each other's paths in a kind of careless, synchronized dance. They were not exactly together; nor were they exactly apart. Rich Guthrie, our information man, told us that they were playing with each other. "Eagles are by nature solitary. But," he added, "that does not mean they're anti-social. They'll turn a chance encounter into a marvelous display of skillful flying techniques."

Since that trip I've been asking everyone I know if they have ever encountered a bald eagle. A surprising number have. My neighbor down the road was working on a house near the Ashokan Reservoir when an eagle swooped by so close he could see the flaring nostrils in its immense, curved yellow beak. Two days later another plunged out of the blue in a high, wide curve paralleling the trajectory of a diving supersonic fighter plane, or perhaps vice versa. Another friend watched an eagle and his mate improve a nest. One by one each would pick up a stick about a yard long and an inch thick and fly it to the top of a huge tree. There they laid them on top of others, jiggling them carefully into place if necessary. Later, my friend returned to his hidden observation spot and saw the female incubating her eggs. Still later, both male and female were working overtime, tenderly feeding squawking beaks. On his next visit the fledglings were testing their wings. His sighting of two and perhaps as many as three eaglets was a rarity because bald eagles seldom lay more than one or two eggs.

Some Facts about Eagles
Here are a few facts I've learned about bald eagles. First and foremost, "bald" does not mean that the head is not feathered; it is simply an old English word for white. However, the birds do not get the clearly marked white head and tail feathers until they reach maturity, that is, when they are four or five years old. Until then the head is a reddish brown; this makes it easy to confuse a younger bald eagle with the golden eagle. Immature eagles are also often misidentified as turkey vultures. In flight however, an eagle's wings are broader, flatter and longer spanning up to seven and a half feet. The sheer size of the bird, and its very big head, are also markers. The larger female occasionally reaches 34 inches. The eagles' call is a high, harsh cackle: kweek-kit-ik-ik-ik-ik; kak-kak-kak.

Bald eagles mate for life, returning to the same nest every year. Still, they migrate alone. They enjoy a long life span for a bird, around 30 years in the wild; a bald eagle in captivity once made it to 47. The staple of their diet is fish. Alas, Benjamin Franklin's cranky comments were true. They are scavengers, or, more politely, opportunists. They would much rather pick up dead fish from the river's edge or snatch it from a more energetic bird than catch it themselves. They also eat carrion. But their predilection for feasting on railroad victims is a dangerous enterprise. Their hearing is none too good, and they themselves are sometimes killed by onrushing trains. Should hunger force them to catch live prey, they will pursue injured birds or make a duck dive until it becomes so exhausted it becomes easy to catch.

The Winter Bird
Winter is the best time to see bald eagles. There are a great many more of them on the river, for migrants who nest in the far north come south to the Hudson where, because the shipping channel is always kept open, the river never entirely freezes over. They can be seen especially early in the morning from say seven to nine or in the evening from four to five, perching on the tops of tall leafless trees and scanning the beach for a tasty meal. Or they may bob to and fro on ice floes, hoping a dead fish will float by. And if worse come to worst, they will plunge their claws into the icy river to catch a live one.

Other good viewing spots are from New Baltimore's riverside park (www.newbaltimoreconservancy.org) or from the train between Albany and Croton., or, if you are actively inclined, along the stretches of frozen river used by local ice boaters. If all that fails, the Raptor Center in Milan has had a male and a female bald eagle since the early 1990s. Their names are Luke and Annie and they are good friends rather than mates. Annie looks after Luke, who was the more severely wounded of the two when found. The Center looks after them affectionately too, tossing them one or two plump rats a day.

Until 1997 it had been 100 years since an eaglet had hatched in the Hudson Valley. Early on farmers shot them for bounties, reducing the population dramatically, and more recently, poisons such as DDT penetrated their systems, causing infertility or thin shelled eggs that that broke before full incubation. Some time after DDT was banned, the NYS DEC began a project called "hacking," which involved lifting eaglets from far western nests where their numbers have soared, and carefully hand-raising them as Hudson River residents. It was hoped they would think they had been born here and would nest here. They did. By 2002 the number of fledglings hatched in the valley had risen to 12. The number slipped back to nine in 2003, but the DEC is confident a breeding population has been established.

Of course the eagle is nowhere near as prolific as the wild turkey, which now number in the thousands. Benjamin Franklin would have been delighted.