Displaying items by tag: bald eagle
TWRA wants your data on Tennessee’s wild turkeys
American wild turkey populations have recovered from historic lows. TWRA still needs help managing the modern populations. Courtesy Eric Lowery via Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency
TWRA wants you to help build research on USA’s second bird
NASHVILLE — Benjamin Franklin only joked (we think) about making the wild turkey the national bird, but this summer you can help Tennessee with research on the turkey’s national history and renaissance.
Turkeys and bald eagles both grace the state and Southeast and have a notably parallel history of climbing from dire straits nationwide.
The bald eagle became the national symbol on the U.S. seal in 1782.
Declaration of Independence signer Franklin said he would have preferred a different bird. While he may have been joking, he never lobbied for it publicly. His comments in a letter to his daughter, Sarah, have become infamous.
“For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him … the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.”
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Bald eagle release by Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency
This bald eagle was shot but successfully rehabbed at Memphis Zoo
STEWART COUNTY — April 8, 2022 Return to the wild!
Claws out: Sevier County is a center of raptor rehab
Library of Congress
Sevier County raptor center will be largest in North America
Project Eagle has landed.
The American Eagle Foundation broke ground Sept. 21 near Kodak, Tennessee on the largest raptor education and rehabilitation facility in North America.
Scheduled to open fall 2022, Project Eagle will be the new home of Challenger, the famous bald eagle seen swooping across football fields as the proud national symbol of the United States of America.
Lead is flying as bald eagles face ambush on road to full recovery
This grounded bald eagle at a wildlife refuge in Missouri eventually succumbed to lead poisoning. Lead from bullets and shot are the latest threat to bald eagles, the recovery of which is an American conservation success story. Betty Thompson
Once again bald eagles are in trouble: This time the threats are a deadly recipe of lead and neurotoxins.
The recovery of America’s bald eagles is one of the greatest environmental success stories of the past 50 years. From an estimated overall population of about 800 at the depth of their decline, they have rebounded to about 100,000 today living near water in Alaska, Canada and all of the lower 48 states.
Hellbender Press has covered the success story that brought our national symbol, the bald eagle, back from the brink of extinction.
The cause of that long-ago calamity was ferreted out with the help of an early citizen-scientist, a retired Canadian banker living in Florida named Charles Broley, who became interested in eagles and obtained a permit to band eaglets. Between 1939 and 1946 he banded a total of 814 of them in the nest before they fledged.
As the years passed Broley observed a population decline and initially thought habitat loss was to blame. But in an Audubon article he penned in 1958, Broley concluded, “I am firmly convinced that about 80 percent of the Florida bald eagles are sterile.”
But why? Broley was the first to speculate that the use of organochlorine pesticides, most notably dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT for short, was somehow the cause; but he had no proof and didn’t know how the chemical compound actually affected adult eagles.
Broley’s suspicions and others were brought to national attention by Rachel Carson in her landmark 1962 book, “Silent Spring.” DDT was outlawed in 1972 and the eagle population slowly began to recover.
And today? Bald eagles still face problems — both old and new.
The old one is lead poisoning.
Bald eagles fly with the Tennessee angels who helped save them from extinction. We must keep them on the wing.
American Eagle Foundation founder Al Cecere releases a rehabilitated bald eagle at Ijams Nature Center on Aug. 12, 2016. The foundation named her Summit in honor of UT Lady Vols basketball coach Pat Summit. Photo by Chuck Cooper.
Is the bald eagle’s remarkable comeback fading down the stretch?
(Part one in a series)
It was a damp morning in early spring 2005 when Paul James and I met Linda Claussen at Seven Islands Wildlife Refuge along the French Broad River in east Knox County. Heavy rains had fallen through the night, but the clouds were beginning to break. As we walked down Kelly Lane toward the river the vocalized yearnings of thousands of chorus frogs could be heard singing from the soppy floodplain along the river. Spring was definitely here.
The refuge itself was the brainchild of Linda’s late husband, Pete. In the late 1990s, he formed the Seven Islands Foundation, a privately owned land conservancy, and began setting aside property to be protected and restored to a variety of natural habitats. Most of the acreage had recently been fescue pasture maintained for grazing livestock and hay production.