Put 'Em in a Tree Museum

摘要

Seeing a bald eagle in one of your trees is like running into a movie star on the street. After years of viewing two-dimensional images, there's a conspicuous shock in encountering the thing in the flesh, looking just like its pictures. Or like the back of a quarter. Majestic white head, curved beak, a wingspan to die for: yep, that's the national bird eating one of those trout bought and paid for at the hatchery. It's so thrilling you want to ask for an autograph, perhaps a scrawled "E Pluribus Unum." The slow but sure reappearance of the bald eagle in this part of Pennsylvania is both a tribute to environmentally sound decisions of the past and a cautionary tale of what the future holds. The eagle's disappearance had to do with the presence of the pesticide DDT in native waters, which built up in the birds' bodies and weakened eggshells so perniciously that few chicks were ever hatched.