killed in large numbers by the birds.” In 1917, bald eagles were considered such a scourge in Alaska that the government sponsored a bounty of 50 cents a bird, later increasing it to a dollar this led to more than 120,000 confirmed kills. In various newspaper accounts from around the turn of the 20th century, you can find our national bird making “great depredations upon chickens and ducks,” poultry farmers “at their wits’ ends” and “pigs, calves, goats and lambs.
Harris is hardly the first farmer to have a bald-eagle problem. But as he would discover, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Whatever was to be done about the eagles, Harris’s farm would work with nature, not fight against it. And not that he would, but shooting a bald eagle is punishable by a $100,000 fine and a year in prison. His faith in biodiverse, sustainable methods has only been affirmed by his multimillion-dollar annual revenues. Harris is an idealist, the kind of all-natural farmer whose cows finish on grass, whose birds run free, whose goats and sheep transform overgrown land. He knew he needed to stop it, but what do you do about a bald-eagle infestation? Nobody in Bluffton had ever heard of such a thing. The eagles were killing thousands of his chickens. By this time, Harris had realized he had a problem. In one image, three juvenile eagles are sparring in flight, their talons bared, their wings stretched, the head of a dead chicken floating in the air among them. Wildlife photographers were welcomed out to take pictures. The record that year was almost 80 at one time. Counting eagles on the farm became a local sport. By late 2015, when the leaves had fallen from the trees and the northern migration had arrived south, bald eagles hung on the branches of Harris’s trees like Christmas ornaments. That was back when Harris had only a few eagles.
When people asked about the situation, he had a little sales pitch: “You’ll never get a sick chicken from White Oak Pastures, because a bald eagle will get it first.” Predators often take the easiest prey available, weeding slow or sick animals from a flock. Wolves and cougars once put pressure on bison to keep moving over long ranges of land, and he says, “There was never overgrazing because the predators were behind the animals pushing them on, giving the land naturally a chance to rest.” Harris mimics that cycle of rotation and rest in his own pastures, and he believed that the bald eagles might be similarly beneficial. Top predators have long played an important role in nature. Harris was initially pleased by this development. This was a bald eagle looking down on his farm. Sure enough, perched in the high branches of a loblolly pine was that unmistakable silhouette: wings broad as shoulders, beak pointed like a curved dagger, crest as white as milk. One day in 2011, Harris picked a pair of binoculars off the dash in his Jeep and pointed his gaze toward the sky. To the bare eye, they might have been any other raptor, any bird of prey. They came to Bluffton, a small agricultural town in the southwestern corner of the state, one or two at a time. Just the sound of his South Georgia drawl can move a herd of half-ton heifers, so how much trouble could a 10-pound bird be? Besides, he sort of liked them.
Harris, the owner and patriarch of White Oak Pastures, a thriving family farm in Bluffton, Ga., is a stocky, stubborn, fourth-generation cattleman who shades his bald head with a sweat-stained hat. He does not get his Living honestly.”īut the first time Will Harris saw a bald eagle on his farm, six years ago, Franklin’s lesson was one he had not yet learned. In a letter to his daughter, he wrote: “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country. Noble virtues do not map neatly onto apex predators, a fact that troubled Benjamin Franklin as early as 1784. A real bald eagle is made of flesh and feathers and talons - a thing of nature, not a pastiche of concepts. His wings stretch out tall and wide from behind a shield, and his fulsome beak holds a ribbon inscribed with Latin: “ E pluribus unum.” That is a collage of symbols about peace and war and history and unity, not a bird. Take the Great Seal of the United States: The eagle clutches an olive branch in one claw, a set of 13 arrows in the other. The bald eagle, a bird that lives only in North America, is sometimes mistaken for an idea.
0 kommentar(er)
