“Have you ever seen the eagles?” In case you’re a New York State birder who has been stopped by a state trooper whereas driving only a smidgeon over the velocity restrict on the best way to a once-in-a-lifetime rarity, you’ve in all probability heard this query. You’ve defined to the trooper the way you’re so enthusiastic about seeing this chicken and so nervous that it’d fly or swim off earlier than you get there that you just took your eye off the speedometer, and the trooper asks a couple of chicken he thinks is the rarest of all. And you already know he means Bald Eagle, not Golden Eagle, a chicken additionally seen in some areas of New York State however not a part of our nationwide tradition. Bald Eagle isn’t a uncommon sight in New York State nowadays. Go to the Hudson River Valley in winter, the place they’ve been holding an EagleFest the primary week of February for 21 years, and also you’ll see dozens of Bald Eagles perched in giant timber close to the river, preventing one another over a crow carcass on the ice, flying proper over your head. Go to Montezuma Wetlands Advanced in mid-April and see 15 lively Bald Eagle nests unfold out over 50,000 acres. Preserve your eye out in my neighborhood in New York Metropolis! But when you already know your conservation historical past, you already know that the trooper isn’t unsuitable to be excited, and also you share your most up-to-date Bald Eagle sightings, hoping that your shared enthusiasm and awe will convey you a warning and never a rushing ticket, carrying the great vibes to a profitable rarity chase.
In 1963 there have been 417 identified nesting pairs of Bald Eagles within the decrease 48 states, down from an approximate inhabitants of 400,000 eagles within the 1800s. First there was the human persecution–looking, trapping, poisoning–then the disastrous results of DDT, the pesticide indicted by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. By the Nineteen Seventies, the Bald Eagle was extirpated from a lot of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains besides the Nice Lakes area. Quick ahead to 2021: an estimated 71,467 pairs of Bald Eagles nesting within the decrease 48 and a complete inhabitants of 316,708 people! * How did we get from fringe of extinction to what some suppose is overabundance? Stories and web sites will discuss in regards to the protections of the Endangered Species Preservation Act (Bald Eagles south of the fortieth parallel have been added in 1967) and the banning of DDT in 1972. There may be far more. You may’t simply snap your fingers and convey birds again, even when they’re apex predators, it requires the ingenuity, dedication, and laborious work of area employees, biologists, raptor fanatics, and authorities officers. Tina Morris’s memoir/conservation historical past Return to the Sky: The Stunning Story of How One Girl and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle fills in an extremely vital a part of this historical past. It’s an enticing, uplifting narrative, each memoir and conservation historical past. The superb factor is, we might by no means know this story if Tina Morris had not determined to inform it.
I photographed this grownup Bald Eagle on the Hudson River in 2014. Thanks, Tina Morris!
Return to the Sky is Morris’s story of how she pioneered the science and artwork of ‘hacking’ Bald Eagles on Clark’s Ridge, an remoted cliff inside the Montezuma Nationwide Wildlife Refuge east of Seneca Falls, New York State. She fed, noticed, tracked, and cared for seven eaglets in 1976 (two eaglets) and 1977 (a whopping 5 eaglets), taking care to do as a lot as she may from a distance, so the eaglets didn’t imprint on her. Morris was younger, inexperienced, and considerably misplaced career-wise, struggles detailed within the few two chapters, however decided to work with Dr. Tom Cade and The Peregrine Undertaking at Cornell College. In a collection of lucky circumstances, some rooted in Morris’s optimistic persistence, some within the luck of it being the 1970’s, the time of the U.S. Bicentennial, she grew to become the one and solely area employee in a brand new venture based mostly on The Peregrine Undertaking’s work. “Hacking” is a centuries-old method for elevating and releasing falcons; Cade and his colleagues had taken it from falconry and tailored it to the re-introduction of Peregrine Falcons, one other raptor decimated by DDT, into the wild (generally the city wild). Everybody–Cade, the biologists and authorities coverage makers of the NYS DEC (Division of Environmental Conservation) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service–wished to convey Bald Eagles again to New York State in time for the Bicentennial. Nobody knew precisely how. Although everybody agreed that Bald Eagles aren’t Peregrine Falcons, the success of The Peregrine Undertaking provided a doable path, adjusting the hacking methodology used with the falcons to the wants of younger eagles obtained from the Nice Lakes (additionally, later, Patuxent Wildlife Analysis Middle, Maryland), the place that they had not but been decimated. And so, Tina Morris discovered herself alone on the highest of Clark’s Ridge, tenting out for the subsequent few months along with her two canine, answerable for the way forward for the Bald Eagle in New York State.
Morris’s experiences remind me of Sophie Osborn, who delineated her experiences hacking younger falcons for the Peregrine Fund within the first a part of Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Amongst Endangered Birds (additionally printed by Chelsea Inexperienced in 2024). Solely whereas Osborn was following a perfected technique in 1991, Morris was figuring issues out as she went alongside fifteen years earlier. The Peregrine Fund workers, significantly Jim Weaver, constructed the hacking tower and have been out there for consults, however they have been an hour away and this was pre-digital age–no cell telephones, no laptops, no prompt communication. The way to feed the eaglets till they have been capable of fly, and use their talons and beak to catch meals and feed themselves? And would they have the ability to do these important life abilities with out parental instruction? Flying itself took observe, and the eaglets tended to finish up caught within the close by marsh the place Morris needed to find them with the help of transmitters (once more, pre-digital), wade into the muck, work out a method to re-capture them with out damage (to herself and the younger eagle). Her resolution, utilizing a cut-off blue denims leg to cowl them, astonished skilled raptor consultants at a later convention. Like Osborn, Morris frequently anxious in regards to the security of her expenses, acutely aware of predators and pure calamities, however right here the stakes have been a lot greater. Everybody, she feels, has their eyes on her, everyone seems to be relying on her to discover a method to make Bald Eagle hacking viable and repeatable.
There are different threads that run via Morris’s narrative: her surprising emotions of loneliness and her loving relationship along with her canine, her solely companions throughout these months; her private reluctance to let herself be a “star” as soon as the venture is profitable, one thing she now regrets; and, associated, her continuous consciousness that she was a lady in a area dominated by males. This will appear unusual to some readers, but it surely’s one thing I completely perceive having additionally began my profession within the late 1970’s. The second wave of the ladies’s motion was simply getting began on the time and though icons like Dian Fossey impressed Morris, the truth was that there have been few ladies in ornithological or organic analysis who weren’t workplace managers (certainly one of my first jobs was at a prestigious analysis college the place star scientists (all male) performed tennis whereas their ‘secretaries’ (all ladies) ran their labs). For Morris, her self-consciousness of being feminine is private, not political (she doesn’t get the connection to Seneca Falls, seat of the suffrage motion, until many years later). It manifests in delicate ways in which makes her accomplishments much more brave. Her life and profession choices, described within the latter components of the e-book, are emblematic of a time when there was no outlined pathway for girls scientists and every thing was an experiment. Form of like taking good care of seven eaglets.
© Cornell College & Tina Morris; Tina Morris being inducted as an honorary member of the Iroquois nation, p. 122.
Three highlights of the e-book happen many years aside. In 1977, Morris is honored by the Iroquois nation for bringing the Bald Eagle again to their skies in a ceremony that surprises and delights her, partly due to the participation of the Iroquois ladies. In 2015, Morris discovers that certainly one of her expenses, M3, band quantity 03142, the younger eagle she felt most near, has died. She knew about this eagle, who had fathered 70 Bald Eagles at Hemlock Lake, certainly one of New York’s Finger Lakes, however she didn’t understand it was her M3 until it was by accident run over by a automotive whereas consuming a kill. M3 was “the best and longest dwelling Bald Eagle in identified historical past.”
After which in 2022, Morris returns to Montezuma NWR, the primary time since she left Clark’s Ridge in 1977. It’s an expertise of shifting recollections and private triumph as Morris reclaims her work and its triumphant aftermath. The refuge is filled with eagle’s nests, extra proof of success. It seems that nobody knew that the Bald Eagle hacking venture, which was handed over to the NYS DEC after its two years with the Peregrine Undertaking and Cornell, began at Montezuma. Or that Tina Morris existed. I don’t know if that is when she began writing her story, however the truth that she did and that we are able to now examine her two seasons with the Bald Eaglets speaks to the significance of writing private historical past. Morris’s story carries a lot extra weight than I feel she anticipated. It exhibits that discovering one’s ardour, at work and in life, doesn’t all the time comply with a straight line; that enthusiasm, a way of journey, and creativeness triumphs over straight teachers; and that one individual could make a distinction, a cliche, however rooted in actuality, as this story exhibits.
Morris writes in a standard narrative fashion with a heat, genuine voice. She begins from childhood, talks abut her life and profession after the Bald Eagles, and ends along with her return to Montezuma. A number of chapters give attention to the conservation facet of the story, giving it a broader context. I might have favored to know somewhat extra in regards to the development of the Bald Eagle hacking packages throughout the U.S. and the way her graduate thesis served as a template for them, however I perceive the will to give attention to topics immediately associated to non-public expertise. The e-book is enlivened with a number of black-and-white pictures of the hacking venture, together with two nice images of the hacking tower and Morris climbing up the tower. As standard, I’d like extra! And I did discover extra on-line and in coloration in uploaded shows Morris has given to birding organizations (simply discovered by looking for “Tina Morris” and “return to the sky”). You can even take heed to Morris speak about work with the younger Bald Eagles on the ABA Podcast. These are each good introductions to the e-book itself, Return to the Sky: The Stunning Story of How One Girl and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle, which I extremely advocate.
@Donna L. Schulman; Grownup Bald Eagle overseeing nest with eaglet and mother in Sanibel, Florida, January 2025 (completely different coloured backgrounds because of differing pictures angles). Though Tina Morris’s venture centered on repopulating northeastern states, her graduate thesis describing the hacking strategies grew to become the template for Bald Eagle hacking packages all through the U.S., together with, in all probability, the one in Florida.
* Axelson, Gustave, Extra Than 316,000 Bald Eagles Stay within the Decrease 48, New Estimate Says, March 24, 2021; https://www.allaboutbirds.org/information/new-bald-eagle-population-estimate-usfws/
Return to the Sky: The Stunning Story of How One Girl and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle
by Tina Morris
Chelsea Inexperienced Publishing, Oct. 2024
208pp.; Hardcover, $28.00
ISBN: 9781645022633