Eagles in Florida suburbs

Here’s the NY Times take on how Florida is home to a lot of bald eagles, and a surprising number of them are living like many of us – in the ‘burbs.

I fell in love with this article at the third paragraph. The wonderful idea that the eagles “have discovered their inner Updike” and moved to the suburbs got to me. I’ve been reading John Updike’s novels since Rabbit was a basketball player. That character has been in a cemetery plot for quite a while now, but the eagles are doing better than we might have expected and now are off the endangered list.

My boyhood home was in Dubuque, Iowa, where the spectacular town park on the bluffs over the Mississippi River is called Eagle Point Park. We never wondered about the name – there were no eagles to be seen in the '50s or '60s, so the name of the park must have been fanciful. Now if you go there you may see 15-20 bald eagles soaring over the Mississippi. Thanks to the ban on DDT and other conservation measures, they have been back now for years. In the summer I often visit friends who have a house on the Chesapeake, on the eastern shore of Maryland. It’s like over the Mississippi – sometimes a dozen or more eagles soaring over Tilghman Island, down past St. Michaels.

The Times article reports that some real estate developers see the presence of eagles as a marketing tool, which may end up creating larger conservation areas for the majestic birds. Let’s take that with a grain of salt. This is Florida, after all.