Bald Eagles are spreading back over their original range again in a way that is making a lot of people happy, myself included. They are majestic, but I might agree with Ben Franklin about the Turkey, they are a bit smarter, in fact, more than a bit smarter:
but nothing quite says 'America Kicks Ass! like a baldie... but having watched 14 of them hang out on a truck full of fish nets in Dutch Harbor once, I can't argue they serve for stimulating conversation. Sadly, I think Jim Henson's Sam the Eagle got the personality pretty right..
National Symbolism aside, I doubt I need to explain to many readers the story of DDT, Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, and how thin eggshells, which caused massive moralities in recently laid eggs, nearly wiped away birds of prey from the Lower 48 and perhaps many other places on earth..
One of the footnotes to the global impact of DDT was that a company that manufactured it, perhaps 'the' company that manufactured it, Montrose Chemical Corporation, dumped tons of the pesticide into a drainage ditch near it's factory in Torrence, Los Angeles County, LA to dispose of it, (interestingly right next to a neighborhood called Carson, bringing to mind Rachel Carson). That ditch appeared to drain into something called the Dominguez Channel, what serves as kind of over engineered 'river' for this area if you could call it that, and the Dominguez canal would find it's way into Long Beach Harbor.
After a while they stopped this and just started pumping DDT into the sewage system, about a ton every 3 days, therefore tens of thousands of tons over decades, where it went uncleaned through the system, which usually exists to break down excrement, not complex chemicals, and out into the Pacific Ocean near Paloes Verdes, the Hill in the South West corner of Los Angeles with some pretty nice views of both the LA basin and the Pacific,if you don't think about what might have been in the water.http://industriallosangeles.org/sites/montrose.html
So how does this fairly commonplace tale of environmental ignorance from the Big Car Era lead to Hope!?
Well, I was once staying in Banning House Lodge, perhaps 2 years ago, the old house of the family that owned Catalina Island for quite a while, above Two Harbors, dodging buffalo on my walks around day and night, and in the office they had a monitor always displaying one of these web cams since the actual location happened to be just a few hundred yards out the window:
http://www.ustream.tv/west-end-cam
Now realize that Catalina is about as close to Paloes Verdes and Dominguez Channel as any self respecting eagle is going to setup shop. They need room to soar..they gotto be free baby.. they ain't pigeons. What makes this all significant and hopeful, is that up until about two years ago they were stealing the Eagle Chick Eggs to rear in an incubator so it would be free of DDT impacts, basically so the mom wouldn't crush it because it was assumed that she would be eating walrus carcass or seal or what have you, and it's fat especially would be contaminated with the tons of DDT that Montrose dumped 70-30 years ago as they flap around the local waters, and she would sit on the shells to warm them and they would get crushed, which had been the trend for this long Silent Spring. But about 5 years or so ago, they decided to leave the eggs be, and lo and behold, they survived...
http://www.fws.gov/news/NewsReleases/showNews.cfm?newsId=FB243CE4-9CEC-E367-C02C0A0B255EA85E
Vigilance is the eternal price of freedom perhaps, but this is a pretty good sign that despite all the environmental challenges ahead of us, perhaps the DDT problem is slowly fading into the rear view mirror..
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