From Endangered Species to Pests

When I was young, it was special to see a bald eagle. I remember the first time I noticed one. I was nine or 10, taking a sailing class in the Puget Sound, and I looked up and saw the unmistakable white head and tail feathers of our national bird. The sighting felt like a blessing.

Back then, bald eagles were endangered, one of the many bird species decimated by DDT, a toxic pesticide that destroys a bird’s ability to produce viable eggs. As a result of widespread DDT exposure, only 417 mating bald eagle pairs were left in 1963. The pesticide was banned in 1972, but even into the early 2000s, when I spotted one for the first time, bald eagles were a relatively rare sight. It takes a species a while to recover. It was only in 2007 that they were finally removed from the Endangered Species List. Today, they’re not even threatened. In fact, within their home range — most of North America — bald eagles have become, dare I say it, common. And common animals are uncherished animals.

In some places, these eagles are now seen as pests, as ordinary as seagulls or pigeons.

At a post office in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands a sign warns people of bald eagles nesting nearby who may become territorial. More than one person has been swooped at or attacked by an eagle. Aleutian bald eagles scavenge at the local landfill, the nation’s bird picking through our trash for scraps. In nearby Dutch Harbor, a major fishing hub, people have to watch out for eagles who will steal the day’s catch.

If this keeps up, I’d be unsurprised by a return to the attitudes of the early 1900s, when Alaska offered a bounty of $2 for every bald eagle killed. A local editorial wrote of the birds, “Sentimentally, [the bald eagle] is a beautiful thing, but in life it is a destroyer of food and should be and is killed wherever found.” Bald eagles may be federally protected, but now they’re too numerous to be revered.

They aren’t the only creature with a story like this.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, there’s been a “squirrel war” for decades, where people try to eradicate nonnative gray squirrels in order to protect native European reds — tiny things with tufted ears roughly the size of their face, made famous by children’s books like Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. There are red squirrel protection societies, while restaurants feature gray squirrel dishes. The story is that the gray squirrel is mostly responsible for the red squirrel’s demise — ignoring the fact that people once hunted red squirrels, believing their scurrying was harmful to beloved trees. Until the 1970s, red squirrels were legally classified as pests. They became beloved only after they began to disappear from the landscape.

Here in the US, deer can be divisive. When I visit friends in the rural Midwest, I delight every time I see a live deer along the road. I love how their long noses and black-rimmed eyes make them look elegant and delicate. My friends rarely even turn to look. They think instead of people they know who have been in car accidents when one of the too-numerous deer sprints into the road.

I understand how familiarity with animals might create apathy, if not contempt. (It’s no accident that we think so little of the animals raised by the millions for food.) But it worries me that we care most about animals when the survival of their species is at stake. Pigeons and starlings may be common, but it doesn’t make them less beautiful or fascinating than an endangered whooping crane or a Euler’s flycatcher. We’re eager to brand animals as pests when we think they are “too numerous,” but if our own human footprint on the Earth has shown us anything, it’s that any species can become destructive when consumption exceeds resources.

These days, I often see bald eagles on my walks around Portland, sometimes in flight, sometimes in the trees outside my apartment, where they call to each other. These sightings may not be as memorable as they were 20 years ago, but I’ve gained something better: an understanding of who these birds are. Seeing bald eagles in pairs, perched together at sunset, or being harassed by crows, I’ve come to understand them not just as a symbol, but as an animal with a life intertwined with other species, including my own. Their commonness has not made them less surprising; it has given me even more opportunities to be amazed by this world.