Kings in Carrion

The bald eagle is handsome, majestic, tremendously powerful. An individualist, it is rarely seen in the company of more than one of its kind. These attributes make U. S. citizens unversed in Nature proud to acknowledge the bald eagle as their national bird and emblem. Shocking to patriots are the facts that their bird is a bully, thief, coward, eater of carrion. It is so lazy that rather than hunt its own food it prefers to steal the prey of smaller birds. Better yet it likes to avoid all effort by finding its meal rotting in the sun. When Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were appointed in 1776 to design a national seal, they chose the double eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. After lesser men had substituted the bald eagle, Naturalist Franklin wrote:

"For my part, I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character, and does not make his living honestly. . . . With all this injustice, he is never a good case, but, like those among I men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor. Besides, he is a rank coward, the little Kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly, and drives him from the district."

Last week citizens of small Cherryfield, Me. & vicinity were being treated to a sight on a par with that of a king rummaging in a slop barrel. Some of last year's drought-starved Western cattle were shipped to Cherryfield. They failed to recuperate, left natives with a large number of ribby carcasses on their hands. Cherryfielders piled the hulks on wagons, carted them to a lonely spot well back from their Black Woods road, dumped them out to rot. Snow soon covered the charnel heap.

One day in March a wayfarer saw a flock of great, vulture-like birds tearing and gulping the carrion. They were bald eagles, of which only an occasional pair had hitherto been seen in the neighbor hood. Since then Cherryfielders have dropped their ordinary recreations to watch the birds. Twice each day, at sun rise and sunset, the eagles swoop on the stinking feast from their five-foot-wide nests in the trees of Cat's Skin Mountains. Observers have been able to approach within 400 ft. of the birds. A truckman's wife counted 30 at one time through her field glasses. Ornithologist Alfred Otto Gross, who had never seen more than four eagles together, went skeptically down from Bowdoin College, beheld with his own marveling eyes 25 great scavengers grouped at their horrid feast. Reporting to the National Association of Audubon Societies last week that migrating as well as Maine eagles composed the group, Ornithologist Gross said: "The loud screams and powerful wing beats of these giant birds were an experience never to be forgotten."

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