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By Root 3217 0

As Barry Lopez noted in Arctic Dreams, Kent found Alaska and Greenland holy shrines at which sojourners discovered “Godlike qualities” in themselves.25 To Kent, the gatekeepers of the Arctic paradise were bald eagles (the fact that Ben Franklin thought these prey birds had “questionable moral character” only increased Kent’s admiration for them).26 For the dust jacket of Salamina—the title was the name of his Eskimo housekeeper in Greenland—he drew an inspired portrait of a bald eagle defending the quiet world from industrialization and mechanized progress.27

Leopold, Edge, Kent, and other conservationists were continually infuriated from 1917 to 1953, because Alaska’s territorial legislature established a bounty system for eagles. It was originally 50 cents an eagle and rose to $2 over the years. The Biological Survey joined forces with the defenders of wildlife and pleaded with the territorial government to rescind its open season on eagles. During those years well over 128,000 bald eagles were shot or poisoned. The crux of the problem was that Alaskan fishermen believed bald eagles were gorging on salmon, depleting rivers, streams, and bays. Every eagle nest found by a professional Alaskan fisherman was destroyed or ransacked. According to the territorial governor Ernest Gruening—a Harvard graduate and a former managing editor of the New York Tribune—the mass slaughter of eagles had “become more or less an established custom.”28 The National Rifle Association (NRA) called shooting bald eagles the “purest of all rifle sports.”29

Giving scientific credence to the pleas of Leopold, Edge, and Kent was Olaus Murie of the Biological Survey, who had spent 1936 and 1937 writing detailed reports on the bald eagle populations of the Aleutian Islands. These Alaskan eagles courted in March and laid eggs in April. Hatching took place in June and fledglings emerged in late August. Most important, Murie (and Hosea Sarber) concluded from studying eagles’ stomachs that salmon weren’t essential to an eagle’s daily diet. Alaskan fishermen were grossly exaggerating the situation, just as Florida’s fishermen had exaggerated the situation with pelicans. Stepping up to defend the rights of bald eagles was Flying Strong Eagle of the American Indian Association. It was sacrilege, Flying Strong Eagle argued, to massacre the national emblem of America because of a dispute over fishing; eagles, he argued, were a sacred species. They were the embodiment of wilderness, freedom, and strength. “Although the evidence did not persuade Alaskan legislators,” the historian Morgan Sherwood wrote, “over the years the eagle’s case was heard sympathetically by a variety of outsiders.”30

Triumph came on June 8, 1940, with the passage of the Bald Eagle Protection Act. Congress at last recognized that eagles were essential to Alaska’s ecosystem. No longer could Lower Forty-Eighters pursue, shoot, poison, wound, kill, capture, trap, collect, molest, or disturb bald eagles for “any purpose.” But there seemed to be no attitude of self- congratulation in ornithological circles regarding the legislation. Congress, although it prohibited the destruction of eagles in the states, exempted the Alaskan territory from this ban.31

Eventually, killers of bald eagles could be fined up to $10,000. But by the 1960s chemicals such as DDT were starting to wipe out the species in the Lower Forty-Eight. Alaska was not an important agricultural area and, consequently, much less DDT was released there, so its bald eagle population held firm. However, the continued reckless clear-cutting of Alaska’s old-growth trees was troubling. Bald eagles built their nests up to eight feet across and seven feet deep on top of Sitka spruce and western hemlock. These trees continued to be timbered in the Tongass and Chugach at an unhealthy, even maniacal rate. This loss of habitat looked as though it might spell doom for the bald eagle. But committed activists started an effective campaign after World War II to rescue these magnificent birds from going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.