Rogers - Eagle

A few years ago I sat with a friend on a beach on the Northumberland Strait, a narrow body of water that divides Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, watching the birds take advantage of the low tide. A bald eagle flew into view; we admired its dramatic markings and powerful flight. It made a few passes over the flats, moving more slowly and deliberately than the other seabirds. Suddenly it became a dark streak and struck a black cormorant in mid-air with breathtaking speed and precision. The two birds fell to the sea floor, the cormorant (which is not a small bird) struggling desperately. On the ground the eagle looked twice the size it had in the air it dragged its frantic prey behind a low rock and began to tear at it. Although the rock hid the worse of the violence, we were horrified at what followed. For long moments we could see the cormorants head or wing wave over the rock as the victim thrashed: the eagle was eating it alive.

In those few minutes we had witnessed many of the associations people have with eagles. Across cultures and through millennia, eagles have been known for their elegance, power and cruelty, and these characteristics have caused eagles to be among the most mythologized and storied of birds. Human emotions towards eagles range from reverence to repugnance and yet they are also deeply mysterious to us. As a general rule,they tend to live on the fringes of the human world they are rarely tamed and, even in the case of the largest and most dramatic eagles like the golden eagle and the bald eagle, our imaginations about their lives often outstrip our actual knowledge because we are forced to observe them at a distance. And yet while our scientific understanding of eagles has been hardwon, eagles are far from unknown in the larger sense: being birds of such rough beauty and aggression, they are a conspicuous presence in many cultural narratives. Often called the king of the birds, eagles rule in the human imagination as much as they rule the ecosystems they inhabit.

Their place at the top of the food chain, however, presents an inborn vulnerability for these magnificent birds. Like many other major predators, they breed slowly; even in optimal conditions eagles just barely maintain their populations. Our modern world, of course, is forming ecologies that are far from optimal for eagles and many species are endangered by pollution, urban sprawl, habitat destruction and direct persecution by people. As a result, we are at risk of losing a key character in our ecological, cultural and perhaps even psychological landscapes.

Broadly speaking, the eagle is a symbol of paradox and liminality states of contradiction and in-betweenness. Symbols like this can refer simultaneously to two oppositional things at once or to something that refuses absolute categories of understanding. Much of this symbolic ambiguity can be traced to the real lives of eagles and their function in the biological world. They are the ber-hunter, often seen as the red tooth and claw of nature as they weed out the sick, the weak, the slow and the unlucky. They gorge themselves on the flesh of the innocent, and not only that, but on the decaying corpses of the already dead. They seem voracious and indiscriminate a random killing machine, a thief and a scavenger who is lazy with the opportunistic cruelty of the criminal. Even their infants kill each other. On the positive side, we see eagles as noble: large, powerful, with the proverbially piercing eyes that seem to watch over us. They soar amazingly high and fast, with apparently little effort. They are long-lived, (mostly) loyal to their mates and attentive parents. They are clever and resourceful. They are beautiful. Religious beliefs are built around them.

In all of our imaginative ideas of eagles these polarities and contradictions persist. And indeed, in the realm of the gods eagles are the bringers of life and death equally. Fair-minded observers have long noticed that even the apparently disgusting behaviours of eagles have positive effects; carrion eaters clean the world of decayed corpses, bacteria and disease, creating a healthy environment so that others may live. We come full circle; the eagle is a resurrectionist. The eagles of Zeus communicate his often arbitrary and inscrutable wishes to men; capable of great vision, but also motiveless cruelty, the god and his familiars are perfectly matched. North American eagles carry us between the land of the living and the land of the dead and it is not necessarily a one-wayjourney. As a bird of destruction and resurrection the eagle is extended into fantastical creatures like the phoenix, as well as hybrid beings like the gryphon and the sphinx. A figure of death, but also regeneration; a symbol of freedom, but also tyranny; we look to the eagle to exemplify the best and the worst qualities of our own existence, and of ourselves.