A trip back to the Tennessee Valley

 

Natural Histories
Stories from the Tennessee Valley
by Stephen Lyn Bales

Lovely book!  Although my impression of it might be warped by his clever placement of the Bald Eagle success story at the end of the book. So after reading about the demise of the Carolina Parakeet and the Dusky Seaside Sparrow, it was lovely to hear that the eagle was on sound footing again.

First he writes about how around  Christmas there used to be a tradition of men and boys going out to conduct "side hunts", where every creature they could see were killed and counted. Most of those were birds. He had an active hand in persuading the men to give up killing the birds and simply count them instead. Sounds improbably--but I believe he is telling the truth.

That was before my time, of course. I was a child of the sixties and seventies, when DDT was steadily wiping out the population of all birds but most especially the big birds of prey--Ospreys and Eagles. I never saw an Osprey until I went to the Texas coast in my young adulthood, and I don't recall seeing a bald eagle until I went out west to Yellowstone.

I remember well the excitement when they began nesting again at Land Between the Lakes and Reelfoot Lake in the early eighties. He writes,
An active reintroduction hacking program began in Tennessee in 1980 with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, Tennessee Valley Authority, and Tennessee Conservation League began working together on the project, The following year, young eagles were released at Land Between the Lakes in West Tennessee's Stewart Count and at Reelfoot Lake. In 1983 a mated pair of unknown original successfully nested and raised one eagle at Cross Creek National Wildlife Refuge near Dover, also in Steward County, and an eagles hacked at LBL successfully nested at a  second location at Cross Creek the Following year. Bald eagles were returning to Tennessee.

I was a young college student then, and both me and my dad were pretty excited at the idea of eagles in West Kentucky (okay, west Tennessee) again.  And now, I see them whereever I go. They're common as mud. Hurray!