35 ~ Eagle, wolf, moon.
photo by neighbor Jerry Davis
On Monday my head was pulled up from a book by the return home of my housemate Jeff, bearing urgent news of an adult bald eagle along the road in front of the house, unable to fly. Feet into boots, arms into jacket, I returned with him to see what we might do. It was dusk, the dawn of coyote time - not propitious for any grounded bird, even an eagle.
The bird was alert and magnificent, with no obvious injuries, yet unable to take flight. I’ve spent most of my life around hawks and eagles, and was able to get hold of our troubled brother and bring him into the house; by its size (awe-inspiring, but still on the smallish side for a bald eagle), probably a male (in most birds of prey, females outrank their mates in size). We put our guest in a dark, quiet room in the basement, and I called to alert my local DNR conservation warden, and then the main wildlife rehabilitation center in Madison.
I take the eagle’s weakness as a metaphor for the battering recently suffered by American democracy (or perhaps, like me, it was just despondent at the Packers’ loss on Sunday). That said, thanks to help from my friend Greg, we now have a more prosaic and precise diagnosis. On Tuesday, a day blessed by a gorgeous fall of thick, soft snow, Greg came over in his all-wheel drive Subaru, we got the eagle into a large cardboard box, and Greg and his Subaru did a good Samaritan run and delivered the eagle to the Madison rehab center.
Delivery of the patient. Photo by Tony Hendricks.
The rehab center soon came back with a diagnosis – lead poisoning. In addition to taking live prey, eagles also scavenge (especially during winter’s time of prey scarcity and cold), and their vector for picking up lead comes with the November deer gun season. After the guns fall silent, scattered across the landscape will be gut piles left by successful hunters, and deer shot and killed but not found. This is a bounty for winter eagles, but one that often comes with the toxicity of ingested lead fragments.
The prognosis for this bird is iffy, and will depend on what additional tests reveal of the precise level of its lead load. It’s likely that this fellow is the male of a pair that nests every year about a half mile from where we found him, at the end of our road (this same nest has been in use for at least nine years straight; see my second post with a pic of the pair here). If so, I know him well, and I hope you join me in wishing him well. I’ll keep you updated as his story unfolds.
My good friend Howard, whom you met last year as first place bidder in my blog’s birch syrup auction, was one of the first people I told about the eagle. Remarkably, he responded with the news that just this month, in the current issue of the national magazine of Alcoholics Anonymous, Grapevine, he published this sublime reflection, below. Eerie, even stupefying, in good ways. I love the synchronistic mysteries of life, and am learning to pay attention to them.
Wolf Moon, wolf land
Late on Wednesday night, beneath this month’s full moon, the Wolf Moon, I went for a long snowshoe in the quiet cold and fresh snow (equipped in two of my most prized possessions - my pair of modified bearpaw snowshoes, custom-made for me more than forty years ago by Floyd Westover of Gloversville, New York, and my pair of wolverine fur mittens, made by Inuit on the the Ungava Peninsula of Quebec). The air was utterly still, the world encased in silence, and the sky achingly clear and bright – just me, the Wolf Moon, and the snow. It was like snowshoeing through a cathedral. Or, in the way the snow’s mantle sparkled unceasingly in the moonlight, like snowshoeing through Tiffany’s, every tray pulled open for inspection.
It was a special night. In addition to the sublime beauty of a full moon on new snow, this is the first Wolf Moon since confirmation that wolves have returned to my corner of the Driftless Area. Wolf and I are now neighbors, both living off the land here. In November, about four miles north of the house, a bobcat trapper caught and released a wolf. And one night last week I recorded this, by holding my iPhone outside the window of my study:
I sent the recording to a DNR wolf biologist, Randy Johnson, and he confirmed that it likely came from a wolf, as did a large carnivore scat I found in November not far from the house, the photo of which I also sent to him:
As I snowshoed in the moonlight, I searched and read the snow blanket for tracks, hoping to cross some very large canine prints. I saw meandering trails of deer, and a squirrel, but no traces (yet) of a wolf under the Wolf Moon. Still, there is magic in knowing wolves are here. That can be enough. It reminds me tangentially of a line in a recent column by one of my favorite Wisconsin writers (and writers, period), Matt Geiger (geigerbooks.com): “My ability to know something is not the thing itself.” To which I could add, my ability to see or touch a thing is not necessary to experience the thing itself. Sometimes living in the between-place of mystery can be enough, and even richer.
Coming in an upcoming post, what makes a real jerk. Watch this page.