Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental historian Jack E. Davis’ “The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird” is a feel-good story. That is, once you’re done feeling pretty darn awful about the way Americans treated these living symbols of national greatness throughout much of the country’s past.
As Davis recounts in his engaging and highly detailed cultural and natural history of the unofficial national bird (Davis points out that no president or Congress has ever signed a proclamation or law making it official), Americans, intentionally and unintentionally, devised all sorts of ways to kill off these majestic raptors that some lauded as “the monarch of the air.” Davis dubs bald eagles “the bird of paradox” and concludes: “Yet no animal in American history, certainly no avian one, has to the same extreme been the simultaneous object of reverence and recrimination. For centuries, eagles risked their lives flying across American skies.”
那是因为即使是大部分市民长期以来，燃烧旗帜正在叛国叛国，他们就不认为旧荣耀的生活同行差不多。阿拉斯加州在1952年达到秃头老鹰队的奖金，并根据政策，近130,000只鸟类最终沿着最后的边境杀死。
There were all sorts of reasons — there always are for shooting things. Long before the Big Lie, the big and small lies told about bald eagles nearly led to the birds’ extinction: Bald eagles were supposedly depleting fish and wildlife. It was said they killed lambs and calves and even carried babies to their deaths, a tragedy graphically depicted by filmmaker D.W. Griffith, he of the racist “The Birth of a Nation,” in the 1908 single-reeler “Rescued From an Eagle’s Nest.”
这些指控也没有限于戴维斯作为“IF-IT-FIES-IT-DIES心态”所表征的美国人的折磨。雄心勃勃的书审查了美国奥运学的历史，而且着名的约翰詹姆斯奥班汇遭到火灾。戴维斯估计，奥杜邦可能很容易杀死2,500只各种各样的物种鸟类，以便用作他的画作的模型，甚至射击母亲秃鹰坐在她的鸡蛋上。更不用说砍掉路易斯安那州的树，以获得一些雏鸟。伟大的男人被摧毁了秃鹰的老鹰，并帮助持久的误解，表征了懦弱和暴虐的生物，显然是因为奥杜邦不喜欢秃鹰来自奥普雷斯的灰烬的方式。相比之下，戴维斯揭示了活着的秃鹰作为真正的动物，与淫乱的神话分开，象征陛下有时已经为国家步枪协会到国家野生动物基金会的组织制定了鸟类标志。
With no natural predators, bald eagles are indeed the monarchs of the American sky. They can fly 35 mph — even faster in a tailwind — using 8-foot wingspans that have greater structural strength than the wings of airplanes. Endemic to North America, the versatile birds have a range that includes Baja California as well as the Aleutian Islands, and hunt prey on land, air and water, with plenty of scavenging mixed in. Bald eagles are monogamous and mate for life, although there are sometimes exceptions. In one whimsical passage, Davis details a polyandrous relationship on the Upper Mississippi River involving a trio of bald eagles: Hope, Valor and a younger male interloper, Valor II.
“秃头鹰”在延伸中陷入困境，主要是因为戴维斯从未遇到过他不喜欢的鹰事实。有时细节，特别是在本书中的延长账户，描述了秃鹰对美国伟大印章所描绘的起源和演变，减缓了故事。
更成功的是戴维斯的令人伤害的损失，即当鸟类终于超越了几乎注定了它们的众多神话时，农药滴滴涕的疾病们在秃头鹰队中占用了秃鹰。戴维斯写道，虽然美国态度开始于19世纪末开始转移，并达到了1940年颁布的秃头保护法案（第一次保护个体物种的联邦法律，即使它排除在阿拉斯加州），猖獗的战后使用DDT介绍威胁远远比任何霰弹枪更致命。老鹰队停止了鸡蛋。或者他们所做的那些鸡蛋有瘦的贝壳容易破裂。秃头人口坠毁，鸟类从他们象征着的国家的巨大条症中消失了。
After the ban of DDT in 1972, bald eagles began to come back and by 2007 were removed from the list of endangered and threatened species. Davis writes that the population appears to have rebounded to historic levels and now there are even nesting pairs in the Bay Area, from Point Reyes to the South Bay. So maybe hope is indeed the thing with feathers — 7,200 feathers to be precise on the average bald eagle. But while we can celebrate the bald eagle as a rare environmental success story, Davis tucks a sobering fact into an easily missed footnote: U.S. Fish and Wildlife estimates that pesticides still kill 67 million birds annually.
The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird
By Jack E. Davis
(Liveright Publishing; 432 pages; $29.95)