Decorah Eagle Cam

Since last weekend, I’ve been regularly checking into the “Decorah Eagle Cam,” a live-streaming camera in a bald eagle’s nest near Decorah, Iowa, where three eggs were laid a few weeks ago; one of them hatched last Friday, a second on Saturday, and the third is still hesitating. The site has gone viral, making newscasts and newspapers around the country and viewed online by around 150,000 at any one time. It’s incredibly fascinating, hypnotizing. The parent birds are vigilant, protective, keeping the nest neat and warm, covering the fur-ball chicks in the wind and cold, feeding them, protecting them. The other day, one of the chicks was out from under the mother, who was sitting on the second chick and egg, and the mother was ordering the nest, moving twigs into position, and the chick picked up a piece of brush in its beak, mimicking its mother, looking to her, not sure at the age of four days what to do with it.

But one of the most interesting aspects of the “Decorah Eagle Cam” is the carrion that has become a buffet at the edge of the nest. I first saw a crow and trout. Then a rabbit. Then a muskrat. Today a sucker. The kids have to eat.

Benjamin Franklin objected to the bald eagle being the symbol for the United States on the Great Seal. He preferred the turkey, which he thought was more what the eagle looked like on the seal anyway:

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . .

The bald eagle, for Franklin, was a scavenger, a thief, more akin to the vulture than the hawk:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen 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 near the River, 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.

Franklin’s concern about the bald eagle as America’s symbol strikes me as particularly prescient in our time, as the United States has for the past at least 60 years – my lifetime – stretched itself out over the globe, pursuing and taking from others, particularly now, as we engage in three wars and have our military deployed in more than 150 countries around the world. We work to order our nest, nurture our young, feeding them, not with trout or muskrat, but with oil, the carrion taken from others with missiles and airstrikes. While the turkey feed contentedly in the stubble of cornfields.