All birbs are good, even bald eagle, it didn’t chose to be the symbol of tyranny. Poor bird.
its only a little guy too. :(
It’s also very funny to me that they actually sound a lot like seagulls.
The iconic eagle screech used in popular media is actually a red tail hawk lol
Me, unprompted multiple times a year:
Did you know the iconic eagle cry is actually a red tailed hawk 🤓
Also as ubiquitous as it is, the red tail hawk cry is still one of the coolest bird calls.
Fellow student of zoology and evolutionary biology or just an ornithology nerd? Either are cool.
I’m just a bird man
Bald eagles are basically just “what if seagulls had talons?”
A lead-brained eagle is quite an apt metaphor for burgerlanders
One thing about eagles that you might not know is that they don’t forage in the dirt for their food like an owl, they hunt other prey animals.
So if eagles are ingesting ammunition fragments they’re doing so out of other birds and small prey animals which have been injured but not killed by hunters in the past. Presumably a lot of their prey has been injured but not killed by hunters if this is a widespread problem.
So there’s a lot of birds flying around (for example, think of the rabbits too) that your dickhead uncle shot with a gun but couldn’t kill and then have to spend the rest of their lives nursing a bullet wound. Probably while trying to feed and raise the next generation of birds for us to mutilate for sport / feed your national icon freedom bird so it doesn’t go extinct.
Whether you use lead free ammunition or not, this shit is unnecessary and cruel. If you can’t catch a duck with your bare hands you don’t deserve it.
It is also bio-accumulative. Similarly to how the eagle was also one of the worst hit birds by DDT. It isn’t just them directly eating birdshot in other birds bodies. It is fish and smaller birds eating stray lead bits in ponds and the grass, then they get eaten, then those animals get eaten by the eagle. Because of how much prey a predator eats over their life, each time you go up one level of the foodchain each of these toxins (lead, DDT, mercury for fish, etc.) can get over 10x higher in concentration.
Ugh yeah good point. Real canary in a coalmine stuff ecologically speaking.
I thought they were opportunistic carrion scavengers and mostly hunted fish, unlike other large raptors that hunt birds or small mammals? So eating shot that was stuck in a wounded deer that ran off and was lost before dying is possible, or lead weights in a fish (or other bioaccumulation in fish).
This is true for bald eagles, yes.
My rhetoric was pretty off the mark in multiple respects here.
I appreciate the corrections.
If you can’t catch a duck with your bare hands you don’t deserve it.
If guns weren’t fetishized to the degree they are, wildlife photography would have supplanted almost all hunting because it shows greater skill while also not being able to shoot up a school.
This is what drove the condors to the brink of extinction. They had to do an awareness campaign to hunters because the government would never simply regulate the lead in ammo.
It blows my mind that ammo isn’t considered hazardous waste because: the bullet is a product used for its purpose at the dischsrge point of the barrel. Therefore throwing lead into the ground is a environmental crime, but pumping lead into the ground with an M60 machine gun is cool
In the latter case you aren’t responsible, the gun is. The gun did it. And you can’t arrest a gun, so nothing to see here.
The USA in action movies
The USA in an actual gun culture
Damn this is like when I have to decide if k9 cops are bastards. Don’t try to make me empathize with “USA in reality” ;-; I will redact the bird if I have to.
This reminds me of a prank call I once heard. This guy called into some conservative/AM radio show and was removed about government regulations and environmentalists and shit. Hosts were eating it up of course. Guy’s like “fuckin endangered species bullshit. If I wanna shoot a bald eagle I should be able to!”. Hosts couldn’t hang up fast enough.
Poor thing. I’ve spotted a few near my house. One was eating roadkill and I stopped and just looked at it. They are a sight to see.
