Conservation can achieve wonders
I can still remember the pictures of the Cuyahoga River in Eastern Ohio catching fire from all the pollution floating on the river surface.
The day was June 22nd, 1969. Today it’s our polluted oceans in the news and last week we all saw the pictures of the garbage being dumped in the ocean from a small boat off the Florida coast. Efforts are under way to stop this ongoing fouling of our waters and today the Cuyahoga and, closer to home, our rivers in Southwestern Pennsylvania are cleaner and less polluted than in past decades.
It has not been easy and has taken the work of countless individuals and government agencies to bring about change. Much work needs to be done, however it appears we are making some progress and this pleases Mother Nature and makes these resources so much more valuable for all of us.
Perhaps one of the great success stories is the return of the bald eagle not only here in our area but across the United States. The Pennsylvania Heritage this quarter has a great article written by Joseph Luxbacher entitled “Recovery of the Bald Eagle in Pennsylvania.” Forty years ago the bald eagle was in danger of extinction across much of the country.
Here in our state by 1983 we were down to just three nesting pairs and in June of that year the Pennsylvania Game Commission instituted the Eagle Recovery Project. Eaglets were secured from Canada and before being released here in Pennsylvania, officers had to make sure they could survive on their own.
To insure success caretakers dawned eagle-faced hand puppets to feed and fledge the young birds. It worked and today we have more than 300 nesting bald eagle pairs and the number continues to increase.
Last summer on the bike trail in Ohiopyle I was treated to watching one of these majestic birds soar down the canyon, grab a fish and have lunch on a boulder at the river’s edge. What a sight. Since they love fish their nests are always near a water source.
At first they are covered with brown feathers and it takes four or five years before they develop the white head and tail. Life spans are usually 15 to 25 years.
The decline in the bald eagle population was the result of the use of pesticides, particularly DDT. The eagles ate fish contaminated with this pesticide from lakes and waterways. The highly concentrated levels of DDT impacted their reproduction by weakening their eggshells. By 1963 US Fish & Wildlife found only 417 nesting pairs in the entire country.
Help arrived in the form of a ban on domestic use of DDT in 1972. This action was in large part a response to naturalist Rachel Carson’s classic 1962 book “Silent Spring” in which the Springdale Pennsylvania native educated the American public on DDT.
A few years later the EPA was established and in 1973 the Endangered Species Act provided critical protection to eagles and other endangered wildlife. Work has also taken place on cleaning our waters and all of this has resulted in a recovery of the American Bald Eagle. Their numbers today are over 300,000 and this shows what can be done when we pay attention and act.
Hopefully we can trudge forward on the climate issues and allow Mother Nature to recover and to continue to provide a home for future generations.
It is not our right to do nothing or just hope it all goes away. We may stumble but must push forward as Rachel Carson did. Our children of the future will ask what we did and let’s hope we can say we, too, acted.