They were not even endangered in the US but in the contiguous US. There was always a large population in Alaska such that people were paid to cull them.
Many "endangered" animals in the US are not endangered in the sense of extinction but in the sense that they are leaving some part of their native range. They are often "endangered in $LOCALE", not endangered generally.
You even say this in reference to Eagles, which are a migratory species whose range crosses hemispheres, as if the contiguous United States is some small aside on that path.
“Don’t worry about the regional extinction of a migratory apex predator because they’re conveniently thriving in dumpsters behind the McDonalds in a town in Alaska.”
My parents lived in a small village in Alaska in the 1990s. Much too small to have a McDonalds or even dumpsters. They had resident bald eagles in the same way many cities have pigeons. That entire region of North America has always been like this. They’ve culled hundreds of thousands of the birds over the last century because they can become a nuisance, particularly if over-populated. They’ll eat anything that looks like meat.
In the same way, the brown bear is almost non-existent in its native range in the contiguous US, but abundant further north. The bald eagle gets somewhat special treatment because it is a national symbol.
Yeah, there are only a few pockets of grizzlies left in the lower 48, and one of them connects to their larger territory in Canada. They used to roam throughout Washington's Cascades but are completely gone, so much so that there are efforts to reintroduce them in the NCNP soon.
Reintroduce.... grizzlies? I know the wolf reintroduction was beneficial, but wolves have killed a grand total of 2 humans in north america in the 21st century. Grizzlies, in contrast, have 11 kills in half a decade (2020- 2025). That's an order of magnitude higher of the danger each one poses, so I'm curious if the grizzly reintroduction yaysayer arguments are using wolve reintroduction as a positive example.
Do you have any stats or study to show that little bears are dangerous? They do not really have a power to hurt anyone. I never heard of case where little bear would kill anyone!
> “We’re used to seeing America’s national bird depicted as a majestic hero plucking wild salmon from pristine streams. But here you can see eagles for what they really are: scrappy, opportunistic feeders. If fresh fish isn’t available, the birds will eat seagulls, ducks, squirrels, mice, the occasional raven, bits of rotten meat dug out of the trash—or, in one case, a piece of pepperoni pizza snatched out of a teenager’s hand. Like us, eagles are adaptable. We should be proud.” [1]
America’s national symbol reduced to dumpster diving and fast food. It scans.
I live pretty close to a couple of bald eagles in central Denver. I have seen one of them mixing it up with the other birds to get table scraps left behind by people using the park. I have no idea what they are eating generally but sometimes they are pretty happy to just grab some bread on the ground or whatever.
I used to think this was crazy, but after I met a few turkeys and bald eagles I concluded he was right (and further, that it would have made a great national bird0.
Reminds me of that joke about the guy who is on trial for killing a bald eagle, and he tells the judge that it was a life-or-death situation: He was lost in the woods, and after several weeks without food he luckily happened upon a bald eagle that he managed to trap and eat to avoid starvation. The judge says, “Well, in that case, we can let you go. But tell me, what does a bald eagle taste like?”
“Oh, sort of a cross between a spotted owl and a California condor.”
"There is something kind of wrong about watching a bald eagle eat a road kill raccoon."
Why? The bald eagle is a ... bird wot eats meat. If the meat dies by other means and involves no effort then cool - dive in and tuck in. I'll grant you - its not for me!
Look at the constraints and restrictions and opportunities for birds. Yes they can fly (why do they fly). Flying requires huge amounts of energy. It needs the body to be "light" which isn't helpful for a predator that might encounter resistance - feathers turn out to be quite a good armour, along with some fancy footwork and some very fancy bone structures help with the weight issue.
The talons and beak are superb adaptations too. Horrid to watch in action but that's what they do.
Try and imagine yourself in the place of your hero bird. It has a sodding hard and quite short life. Now try and imagine how it strives to stay alive and be that symbol you love to think of - it does not care what you think about its diet! It strives to stay alive and that is really hard - even for an apex predator.
I don’t really think it is ‘wrong,’ or even really unexpected. In the winter, fish may not a viable food option for the eagles due to ice or fish lifecycle. Birds of prey have to keep their weight low, and they don’t have the option to gorge themselves on a kill like a wolf or a lion can. Most birds of prey are only a few missed meals away from death by starvation.
Winter’s scarcity is deadly for predators, and nature doesn’t care about maintaining nobility or the optics of a dead raccoon lunch.
>... bits of rotten meat dug out of the trash-or, in one case, a piece of pepperoni pizza snatched out of a teenager's hand.
The article makes it clear that they're inherently "scrappy and opportunistic". You can change the items to match any time period - what about snatching food from a settler's hand, or sneaking a bite of rotten meat a native might have lying around? That's fundamentally the same thing as grabbing food out of a dumpster.
For as much shit as I talk about the state of this country, I'm struggling to use what is, ostensibly, just a bird eating food out of a dumpster as some kind of example of our decline.
only if you extend the definition of "endangered" , this argument/position hinges on the definition of a single word. the far left wants to extend the definition of that word to mean the most devastating, irreversible, "give-us-money-or-the-bird-gets-it" definition possible. The GP however, explains that the dire extreme doesn't necessarily reflect reality.
Its always word games. The word games only work for so long before people realize they're being tricked. Environmentalists that were honest rather than sensational would probably be better for the environment in the long run.
It does not matter, conservatives will willify them all. And will lie about nature and about what environmentalists say. Stop this nonsense where republicans and their donors damage things, lie and then blame their opposition for not being perfect.
>You even say this in reference to the Eagles, which are a migratory species whose range crosses hemispheres, as if the contiguous United States is some small aside on that path.
And yet, according to Wikipedia...
>In the late 20th century it was on the brink of extirpation in the contiguous United States, but measures such as banning the practice of hunting bald eagles and banning the use of the harmful pesticide DDT slowed the decline of their population. Populations have since recovered, and the species' status was upgraded from "endangered" to "threatened" in 1995 and removed from the list altogether in 2007.
The irony of calling someone "unbelievably lazy" without maybe checking to see if there was some accuracy to what they were saying is... lol.
Again, Eagles are a migratory species, that they subsisted by eating garbage in small town Alaska having been hunted and DDT’d to extinction in the lower 48 isn’t the feather in your cap you think it is. The point is that we killed all of the eagles in the lower 48 - a huge swath of territory.
>... that they're thriving eating garbage in small town Alaska...
This is an "unbelievably lazy" and fundamental misunderstanding of how vast and unpopulated Alaska is. I mean you've even got someone else[1] in this thread with experience highlighting that your assertion is inaccurate.
>... and DDT'd to extinction in the lower 48...
You completely missed the part of the quote, in my comment, that very clearly states they were never extinct, and were upgraded from "endangered" to "threatened", and then removed from the list entirely in 2007.
>The point is that we killed all of the eagles in the lower 48 - a huge swath of territory.
It was never true that we killed all of them in the lower 48. Please go read the previously linked Wiki article.
We don't fully know (and probably never will) how many genetic diversity has been lost in USA population, subspecies, etc.
I know you won't but It feels you are about to thank us humans to make bald eagle population lower so their diseases didn't spread. Living in Europe this flow of thoughs it's been heard so much.
>We don't fully know (and probably never will) how many genetic diversity has been lost in USA population, subspecies, etc.
I completely agree with this statement.
>I know you won't but It feels you are about to thank us humans to make bald eagle population lower so their diseases didn't spread.
What does this even mean? I simply want an accurate picture of things. Someone made a statement, someone else attacked them for it and insisted they were wrong, yet in point of fact, the initial statement was accurate. More falsehoods were then spread, and I corrected those, too.
That's 'bout it. To imply that I feel some certain way about bald eagles or species loss because I just asked for an accurate understanding around what actually happened is a bit of a stretch.
I feel that eagles that can fly large distances are in a different category from land animals, which have greater pressures to adapt their lineages to particular geographic ranges, to specialize within the species.
> Many "endangered" animals in the US are not endangered in the sense of extinction but in the sense that they are leaving some part of their native range.
I'm reading this and not understanding where you're going with it. I mean, I get the libertarian bent of the argument: the government is overreaching in an attempt to preserve that which is unimportant, or something to that effect.
But what is the policy aim here? You want eagles to be removed from the endangered species list[1] for... what? So farmers can use DDT again? (The article points out, correctly, that DDT is believed to be the single largest cause of their decline). That seems poorly grounded.
Honestly mostly this just sounds like whining to me.
[1] Which already happened. In 1995! They remained Threatened until 2007 when even that category was removed. In point of fact the success of the bald eagle recovery seems like an argument in favor of species-based conservation efforts. Do you really disagree?
Instead of trying to impute hidden motives, you could just read it as the statement of fact that it was. I wasn't "going" anywhere with it. I've always been an avid conservationist and have actively worked on climate change for decades, I have a pretty good handle of the issues. But I also abhor the popular strain of ideology that believes we should obscure the truth or be dishonest about the reality when communicating with the public because we imagine they might engage in wrong think.
I discovered many years ago that almost everyone is surprised to find out that "endangered" in this context has little relation to "almost extinct" because that is their intuitive understanding of the term and people are encouraged to misinterpret it that way. It comes across as misleading at the very least, which fosters distrust. There is evidence on this very thread that people are confused by this distinction. Furthermore, this has historically been weaponized by activists in ways that are indefensible in the pursuit of other agendas.
If we are going to have adult conversations about these issues then it is imperative that everyone has the same understanding of the tradeoffs at stake and feels they are not being manipulated in bad faith. We have enough challenges with the environment, we don't need to invent new ones.
I still don't understand why you went to that point in a discussion of an animal that (1) isn't characterized as endangered because (2) the relevant conservation effort (decades ago!) was wildly successful.
I mean, do you or don't you disagree with the regulatory practice of labelling "Endangered" species? It sounds like you do. In which case, you're wrong. The Endangered Species Act is a cornerstone of US conservation policy and has saved literally hundreds of species at this point.
You're really reading too much into this. It's an interesting fact that I hadn't heard before, and I appreciated OP sharing it! And from what it sounds like that's exactly why OP shares it: because it's an interesting fact that makes people think.
Why do you persist in trying to assign any motive other than curiosity?
Seems to me like the post is just noting that if you want to postfix "in the US" to "endangered," you should more properly postfix "in the contiguous US." I have no idea why the DDT rant.
The word "Endangered" in this context (which, again, hasn't applied to the bald eagle for 30 years!) is defined by and used within the context of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Inserting an "actuallly" argument is doing nothing but harming understanding.
It is common for people to have an understanding of terms which differs from their precise legal definition, and the difference between the two can be interesting.
There is no libertarian bent in the argument. I suspect a lot of the drive to censor comes out of extrapolations like this, where people are reading into factual statements agendas that are not there.
In 2020, I had this chart showing the IFR for COVID (it's gone down since then due to widespread immunity from vaccination and natural infection) taken down by Facebook's "fact-checkers" because apparently providing the chart without context was "misleading":
Age Group | Low | Mean | High
-----------------------------
0-19 | 0.007% | 0.01% | 0.02%
20-29 | 0.01% | 0.02% | 0.03%
30-39 | 0.04% | 0.05% | 0.06%
40-49 | 0.08% | 0.1% | 0.1%
50-59 | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.4%
60-69 | 0.7% | 0.9% | 1.1%
70-79 | 1.8% | 2.4% | 2.9%
80+ | 3.4% | 4.4% | 5.5%
-----------------------------
Total | 0.4% | 0.5% | 0.6%
Same "I don't like the agenda I suspect this is intended to push" rationale behind the censorship.
Counterargument: characterizing a comment literally asking a question of the commenter as a (ahem) "drive to censor" is even more of a "political extrapolation".
The comment very much did not just ask a question. It specifically mentioned trying to find out what the argument is, and mentioned inferring a libertarian bent where none existed.
I wasn't suggesting that the commenter was pushing to censor. Just that the same kinds of extrapolations are the motivation and given-justification for a lot of censorship. I do concede that it was an off tangent point.
Many "endangered" animals in the US are not endangered in the sense of extinction but in the sense that they are leaving some part of their native range. They are often "endangered in $LOCALE", not endangered generally.