Thursday, 7:00 AM. 9 degrees, wind SW, calm. The sky is overcast and it is still dark. We got 3” of snow last night but the barometer predicts sun.Jack is a berry farmer and is even older and crustier than I am. You have to be a tough old bird to make a living growing berries.
Jack was a fisherman in his younger days, and watched the gulls and eagles from his boat. Some old fishing tugs now ply his berry fields, mouldering away, joining sea to land. When he became a landlubber he missed his birds, and forty years ago started putting fish heads and entrails that he got from his old haunts onto his fields in the winter to attract the birds.
First came the gulls and eventually the eagles, and for about six weeks each winter, until the eagles went off to mate and nest, anyone could watch Jack’s birds from his parking lot. They perched by the dozens in the surrounding trees, chased the gulls, and did aerial acrobatics. One could watch their social interactions, observe their flight patterns and see their various plumage stages. Occasionally one might see a huge golden eagle, or an osprey. It was great, innocent fun. The eagles aren’t around this year, and I knew why even before I asked Jack about them while having coffee in the Northern Edge yesterday morning.
“They shut me down,” he groused, hurt and angry. That didn’t surprise me, as I could come up with a number of reasons why it might not be a good idea to feed the eagles their fish. After all, we can’t have dump bears anymore, because the bears become a nuisance. We can’t feed deer in the southern part of the state for fear it will spread chronic wasting disease (but baiting is encouraged in the north, to help reduce the herd…go figure that one out). Maybe Jack’s enterprise was upsetting the eagles’ natural routines (or maybe not). Maybe it encouraged disease (or maybe not). Maybe it actually benefited the eagles by making them stronger for mating (or maybe not). For every eagle maybe, there's a maybe not. I asked him what laws they cited, and he replied “they said I needed a solid waste disposal license to put a few fish on my land, and a CDL drivers license to haul a couple boxes of fish.” Nothing at all about eagles.
Sorry, Jack. Big Brother got you…you were doing something different, something they didn’t like or didn’t understand. “The nail that sticks up will be hammered down," is what Chairman Mao used to say. You can’t be different, be an odd old coot these days, you will get on somebody’s list and they will shut you down. What did you expect, Jack?
It’s what I have expected would happen from the first time I saw Jack’s eagles. But, what really gets me, is no one even bothered to ask old Jack, a life-long observer of eagles, what he had learned about them. Can’t be much. After all, Jack’s just a crazy old berry farmer who loves eagles.
No comments:
Post a Comment