"The Great American Bald Eagle"

Our writing assignment this week was in reaction to the introduction of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The environment has played a pivotal role in several of my writings, and Silent Spring was even mentioned in my most recent book Narragansett, so to revisit this great work was a thrill.

 

The great American Bald Eagle cocked her head and listened intently for the return cry of her mate. Still, there was no response. From her nest, one hundred feet off the ground, at the apex of three bisecting branches of the ancient Elm tree, she peered over the forest canopy. He was nowhere to be seen. She puffed herself up and let go a few more shrill cries, clicks, chirps, and several loud grunts. "Where are you?" She cried. "Return to me."

The quiet explosive growth of the spring forest absorbed her calls. The trees, shrubs and vines were thick with verdant foliage. The furrowed fields were ripe with young grain, soybeans and beats. The nearby orchards were bent with pollen-laden flowers and fat buds that promised to produce sweet summer fruit. The meadows and riverbanks were overflowing with wild blossoms. The warm sun and the onslaught of vegetation reassured her that it was spring, but she knew something was wrong.

The silence was too deafening, the lack of movement unsettling. The buzz, creep and crawl of billions of insects were absent. The songs of sparrows, doves, cardinals, wrens and robins were nonexistent. Her keen eyesight spotted no movement. Even the river ran uncharacteristically wide and slow. The water was a dark, muddy brown. The ground dwellers, the amphibians, reptiles, and rodents had vacated their hides and burrows. The larger inhabitants of the forest, the deer, fox, raccoon, possum and black bear still tromped carefully through the undergrowth, but many had moved north, away from the unsavory taste of the white powder.

The fine white dust that covered everything added to the stillness. It permeated everything. Instinctively, she knew that it was the root cause of the barren silence. The powder had first appeared during the last summer season, great clouds of it spewing forth from noisy things rumbling through the fields, forests trails and roads, and even from her domain, the sky. During the wet winter, the white dust disappeared into the ground, into the veins and arteries of the earth. Then, at the first sign of warm weather, the dust spreaders had returned with a vengeance. Nothing escaped.

She called for him again, then fluffed her down feathers and nestled more firmly on her precious eggs. He must have had to travel a great distance to find any trout or silverfish in the slow-moving river, or perhaps he went west towards the plowed fields, hoping to capture some field mice. She was hungry and restless. Her three hatchlings would be here soon, and she knew from experience that after their birth she would be too busy to leave the nest. She wanted to stretch her wings once more before the real work began.

It had been too long since he flew off to hunt, several sunrises. Through the dust and hush surrounding her, she realized that he would not be returning. It was up to her now. She decided she had to leave her eggs, just long enough to snag a morsel of a dead catfish she spotted floating between two branches along the bank. She stood up on her strong, feathered legs, and gently placed her taloned-feet on either side of the nest. She bent down and poked her yellow beak at her eggs, attempting to turn them as she had done at least twice daily for the last month.

When the shells cracked, brittle to the touch, she was at first confused. "Perhaps the chicks are emerging early," she thought. But then, when she saw the yellow white, red slush of undeveloped flesh and organs flow uncontained on to the floor of her nest, she knew that she had failed once again.

She took flight, northward, alone.