In case you don't know to what I'm referring, the Decorah
Eagles are a pair of bald eagles who have nested for several years in or near the town of
Decorah, Iowa, and they had a trio of babies this spring. There is a webcam set up over the nest to
track the eagles 24/7 (not 365, because they do migrate as do all birds.)
You could tune in to the webcam whenever you wanted to and
watch the goings on. In fact, according
to Wikipedia, it became one of the most-visited live-stream websites in
history. but more on that later...
One of my good friends who stayed with the eagle watch
informed me recently that, of the three eaglets, one died when it flew into a
power line and was electrocuted, another was apparently mauled by some larger
predator and suffered a broken wing and loss of tail feathers, and the third is
doing well. The injured one is being
cared for at a rescue center and will probably be returned to the wild soon.
Isn't it prophetic that there were three infants and only
two survived infancy, while one of those two was injured and might not have a
full life after all. That is Darwinism
at its most basic level, and mirrors life for most species. Man is the only creature on God's Earth that
intervenes and/or interferes with natural selection by salvaging the defective
ones. But that is a topic for another column.
While I was researching the material for this column, I ran
across the original Wikipedia source for the Decorah Eagles, and
I learned a lot of interesting, if unverified, facts. For one, the original webcam was set up by Raptor Resource
Project in 2007 and was used by PBS for a documentary on eagles in 2008. For another, the 2013 season was missed due
to the eagles moving their nest to a new location, which wasn't found and
re-equipped with the webcam in time.
I've linked the Wikipedia webpage above so that you can read all you
want from it at your leisure.
"And now..." as the late and great commentator,
Paul Harvey, coined the phrase, "...you know the rest of the story."
