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The Courage to Save and Restore: Bald Eagles Return to the Sky
In this special episode, hear first hand the extraordinary story of how one woman helped to save bald eagles from extinction and restore their numbers in North America. Honored by the Iroquois Confederacy with laudatory tribal membership for her remarkable work, Tina Morris was at the epicenter of a national effort to restore bald eagle populations in the lower 48 states from a staggeringly low number of 417 breeding pairs in 1963 to well over 72,000 in 2023. This is a success story – success for science, stewardship, simple action, stalwart courage, and the spirit of humanity working in service to life.
In her book Return to the Sky: The Surprising Story of How One Woman and Seven Eaglets Helped Restore the Bald Eagle (a Chelsea Green publication – use code YOE35 for a 35% discount), Tina Morris shares her extraordinary experience, and recounts the torrential downpours, days upon days of solitude, mosquito swarms, cold food, and indefatigable determination that she encountered and discovered during those fateful months perched along the lake’s edges.
Following WWII, the super toxic DDT insecticide was sprayed profusely throughout the United States, which through bioaccumulation caused the egg shells of bald eagles (an apex predator) to fail before viability, resulting in the decimation of the bald eagle population. A symbol for the United States of America and sacred to many native tribes throughout the lands, the bald eagle represents spiritual ascendance, wisdom of perspective, strength of character, beauty of wildness, far-seeing vision, conveyance of prayers, and a connection to the metaphysical realms. Ironically and tragically, American industry nearly wiped out the very species that adorns and symbolizes this nation’s strength – both in terms of military might and in terms of economic heft and moral primacy.
In the Finger Lakes region of central New York, near the polluting factories of such industrial giants as Alcoa, Carrier, GM, Kodak, and Reynolds, among others, and in the territory of the Haudenosaunee, or “people of the long house” (who united in the Iroquois Confederacy, and demonstrated mechanisms of functional democracy to Ben Franklin and the constitutional framers), the bald eagle made its last stand, high up in a tree stand erected by Tina Morris, where she tended to fledgling incubated eagles for weeks upon weeks to ensure their survival and success into adulthood breeding.
It worked.
Due to the tireless efforts of a self-described “happenstance hero” – a young woman who endured isolation, obstacles, and uncertainty – the bald eagle has been restored to sustainable population levels, and once again soars high above our lands watching over all of us.
About Tina Morris
Raised in a large family and surrounded by myriad orphaned creatures both domestic and wild, Tina Morris was imbued with a lifelong love of animals. Tina earned her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and her graduate degree in ornithology and wildlife biology from Cornell University, where she helped develop the first techniques for releasing introduced Bald Eagles. Her field research ultimately became the instruction manual for eagle restoration programs in other eastern states. Tina was formally inducted as an honorary Iroquois into the Confederacy of Six Nations for her work returning the Bald Eagle to the nation’s skies.
About Chelsea Green Publishing
Founded in 1984, Chelsea Green Publishing is recognized as a leading publisher of books on the politics and practice of sustainable living, publishing authors who bring in-depth, practical knowledge to life, and give readers hands-on information related to organic farming and gardening, permaculture, ecology, the environment, simple living, food, sustainable business and economics, green building, and more. Visit Chelsea Green’s special Y on Earth Community Podcast page to see other episodes with CGP authors. (And, get a 35% discount on all Chelsea Green books and audiobooks using the code: YOE35).
Resources & Related Episodes
Ep 24 – David Haskell, The Songs of Trees
Ep 28 – Scott Black, Exec Dir, Xerces Society
Ep 144 – Vicki Hird, Rebugging the Planet (Chelsea Green Publishing)
Ep 153 – Joy & Eric McEwen, Raising Resilient Bees (Chelsea Green Publishing)
Ep 167 – John Milton, Way of Nature, (Clean Air / Water Acts – Nixon)
Ep 169 – Jeff Poppen, Barefoot Farmer (Chelsea Green Publishing)
Sponsors & Supporters
Earth Coast Productions, Patagonia’s Home Planet Fund, Chelsea Green Publishing, Profitable Purpose Consulting, Climate First Bank, Bluestone Life Insurance, YOE Ambassadors (see: yonearth.org/partners-supporters for special deals and discounts).
Transcript
Welcome to the Y on Earth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry, and today we’re visiting with Tina Morris, the author of Return to the Sky, the surprising story of how one woman and seven eaglets helped restore the bald eagle. Tina, it’s so wonderful to have this opportunity to visit with you today.
5:45 – elizabethmorris
Well, thank you, Aaron.
5:47 – Aaron Perry
It’s I’m really looking forward to talking about your incredible story and how it is so central to the destiny of the bald eagle here in the United States.
6:01 – elizabethmorris
Well, I’m very pleased to be able to share their story because I think that everyone should know the story of the bald eagle, how it disappeared and then came back and then disappeared again and then came and it’s quite a saga that I think is my pleasure to be sharing with everyone out there.
6:23 – Unidentified Speaker
Beautiful.
6:23 – Aaron Perry
Raised in a large family and surrounded by myriad orphaned creatures, both domestic and wild, Tina Morris was imbued with a lifelong love of animals. She earned her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and her graduate degree in ornithology and wildlife biology from Cornell. University, where she helped develop the first techniques for releasing introduced bald eagles. Her field research ultimately became the instruction manual for eagle restoration programs in other eastern states. Tina was formally inducted as an honorary Iroquois into the Confederacy of Six Nations for her work returning the bald eagle to the nation’s skies. So yeah, what an incredible, incredible story and one that I think many of us, at least here in the United States, have heard about one way or another. This situation we’ve had with the bald eagle over several decades where they were brought to the brink of potential extinction. And I was hoping to start us off here with your incredible story. And by the way, I’m going to show the audience, the video audience, your book here, Return to the Sky, an absolutely beautiful book published by our friends at Chelsea Green Publishing. But kicking off your story, Tina, can you paint the picture for us? What was going on, you know, the middle of last century with the bald eagle and the environmental situation in general, you know, even preceding the Clean Air and the Clean Water Acts that were established under the Nixon administration?
8:13 – elizabethmorris
Right. So I think it’s kind of ironic that we had a national symbol, the bald eagle that we put on our seal, and then we just kind of forgot about him and we weren’t really taking care of him. The bald eagles were being killed off by shooting and poisoning and all kinds of other awful ways. People felt that he was, you know, taking their livestock or taking their fish, or they were just a big target. And by 1940, it had become so severe, and the population had plummeted so much that the Bald Eagle Protection Act was passed. And that helped him a little bit until the 1940s or late 1940s, during World War Two, when DDT, a very long lasting pesticide, was invented to be able to combat malaria. So DDT suddenly became prevalent all over the farms and rivers and streams of Eastern North America and mostly in the Northeast. So as DDT began to go through the environment, all the animals that were feeding on the fish and the aquatic life that were absorbing the DDT were suddenly in big trouble. And this kind of went unnoticed for a while until 1960, Rachel Carson, a marine biologist, wrote a book called Silent Spring. And in that book, she pointed the finger at DDT, and said that it was the culprit that was causing the decline of birds, particularly predatory birds. And her findings, unfortunately, were not confirmed until after her death, when marine biologists or biologists in general in the government, she died in 62, only two years after the book was published. And they realized that DDT was actually causing the thinning of eggshells. So when the big birds like the bald eagle, and the pelican and the ospreys would sit down on their eggs, the shells would break. And suddenly their reproductive success went way down, and they started to decline rapidly. By 1963, there were only 417 pairs of bald the lower 48 states, which is much too low a number to be able to sustain a population. You have to figure that those eagles were spread all over the 48 states and they had to be able to find each other and breed and have a successful nesting and it just wasn’t going to be possible. But they couldn’t bring themselves back and DDT was eventually banned in 1972 after all of this information came out about it. And in the 1970s also was really the era of environmental activism. In 1970 was Earth Day and the EPA was created. This all happened, I think funnily enough, under the administration of Richard Nixon, who was a very strong environmental advocate. And a lot of this legislation was being passed. And once DDT was banned, the Endangered Species came along in 1973, and that also helped protect the bald eagle. But the question was, how were we going to replace the population? Because it was obvious the birds couldn’t do it themselves. And that basically led us to the beginning of the book, which was in 1975, when the federal government and the state government of New York decided that they wanted to do something to bring back the bird.
11:52 – Unidentified Speaker
Yeah, amazing.
11:53 – Aaron Perry
Thank you for setting that up. And it takes us right into the Finger Lakes region of New York State, which is actually near and dear to my heart. That’s the region where my folks grew up and my indigenous ancestors on my father’s side have lived for a long, long time. You had this opportunity kind of show up in a very unexpected way, one might say, to work with the birds. And can you describe for us how did that unfold and play out in those first couple of years? And what was it like up there around the Finger Lakes region? And if you could describe the scene for us, that would be great.
12:44 – elizabethmorris
OK. Well, first of all, the Finger Lakes is in central New York state. And there are several sort of long skinny lakes that literally look like fingers that go up towards Syracuse and Rochester in the middle of the state. And that area is a wonderful place for all birds, all kinds of wildlife. It’s filled with wetlands, and all kinds of fish and lots of water birds stop there. So it’s a wonderful be able to reintroduce a bird, but particularly Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, which is at the northern end of Cayuga Lake, was the chosen place to put the birds. And that was partly because of its location next to Cornell University. And we wanted to make sure that the university was close by for a reason, which I’ll get into in a minute. So that area was sort of chosen because of its proximity to Cornell, and also because it was a New York State program in the very beginning, it was also a very good place to put the birds. In terms of my involvement, I would say it was complete happenstance. I arrived at Cornell with one goal in mind, and that was to conserve birds of prey. I’d worked in a zoo for a while. I decided that what I wanted to do was conservation, but particularly of raptors. And when I got there, I wanted to work with Dr. Tom Cade, who was well known for his peregrine falcon reintroduction program. And I thought that if I could work with him, I could accomplish all my goals and everything would be great. Until I walked into his office, and I showed him all the courses I’d been trying to take because I didn’t, I wasn’t a biology major. And I had to make up all those science classes in order to do this. So I walked in with this long list of science classes and thought, well, of course, he’s going to be so impressed with me. He will make me his graduate student right away. That was not the case. He said, I understand how hard you’ve been working, but you need a funded program in order to be able to be my graduate student. And I thought, well, that’s it. Where am I going to find a funded program with birds of And so I kind of gave up for a bit, but then met somebody who was working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And as it turned out, New York State had made a proposal to reintroduce the bald eagle, but they have to make it to the federal government because it’s an endangered species. And the federal government, U.S. Fish and Wildlife said, you don’t have the expertise in the state to able to handle this program, so we’re going to turn it down for now.” Well, who did have the expertise was Dr. Tom Cade. He’d already worked with the Peregrines, he’d been successful, and they wanted him to do it, but he didn’t want to leave the Peregrine program to do that until I came along. And I must have looked so pathetic that he finally said, I’ll tell you what, if you’re willing to work with the Eagles and live up there for three or four months by yourself to release these birds, I will supervise the project. And that’s where it all began. And that’s where me, an inexperienced graduate, not even a graduate student yet, was chosen to head this program, at least in the field. And Tom Cade and his team of peregrine falcon biologists were right there with me the whole time. And we developed the program and it went from there.
16:22 – Unidentified Speaker
Yeah, incredible.
16:23 – Aaron Perry
And so before we move to the experience with the towers, where you essentially were in solitude for most of that several month stretch, can you describe for us this hawk barn, which you refer to as your Valhalla?
16:50 – elizabethmorris
Yes. Thing that I guess the audience should know is that being a female in the raptor world, I was surrounded by male falconers. There were no other females. There were a couple that were doing other things that were related, but nobody was actually hands-on working with the birds. So it was pretty intimidating. And one of the things that Dr. Cade realized was that he had to get me into the peregrine a captive breeding facility, which they called the Hawk Barn. And he had to basically introduce me to his team, who was going to be taking me on as this naive, inexperienced person who they had to teach all the things they knew about raptors and how to handle them. So for me, the Hawk Barn was Valhalla because I went there and all my dreams were there. Captive breeding these birds and releasing them to the wild, which is what I wanted to do. And being surrounded by people who knew everything about their biology and their reproductive behavior and incredibly dedicated group of men who were all really welcoming to me. So I guess that’s what you’re referring to is that I was very happy there and I learned so much by just listening to them and watching what they were doing with these peregrines. Of course, there were no eagles around. We didn’t have any eagles in the Northeast. So it was really a question of what could I learn about the peregrines that then I would be able to transfer to the eagles when we finally got them.
18:30 – Aaron Perry
Wonderful. And so now, as a young woman, you’re out in the wilderness and putting up a tower. Can you describe for us this incredible situation? I mean, reading it was is just amazing. And what a courageous act that you did there. Well, I don’t know, courageous.
18:53 – elizabethmorris
Maybe it was just completely oblivious to all the different things that I was heading into. I really didn’t know what this program was going to entail. I knew, in theory, I was going to be saving a national bird. I mean, how could I turn that down? I had no idea, or I didn’t think about the fact that I had to climb almost 40 feet into the air to reach them and feed them and take care of them when I was absolutely terrified of heights. And so the first day that we kind of went to the refuge to set things up, the electric company had put up four telephone poles. And Jim Weaver, who was the sort of my savior because he knew everything there was to know about birds of prey. He worked with the Peregrine team and he and his crew had built a platform, eight-foot platform, up on top of the four telephone poles. And our mission for that day was to build an eagle nest because there were no parents. We were going to be transporting young eagles from someplace else in the U.S. Where the populations were healthy and bringing them into New York as chicks. They were feathered out, but they were still young and they weren’t able to fly. So there were no parents around to build them a nest. We had to build the nest and we had to make it as much like an eagle nest as we could so they’d feel like they were home. And so with Jim’s knowledge, luckily he had spent some time in Alaska studying eagles. He was able to replicate the nest. He would just tell us where to put the sticks. My problem was getting up the tower. And so that for me was the greatest feat of all time because I had to completely swallow my fear. I couldn’t admit to anybody how scared I was because that would have been the end of the program for me. I had to do it. And it was just one of those things when you’re afraid of something, but your goal is on the other side of it. You just kind of muscle through it. So we eventually did get the nest built and we put a blind up next to it. It was covered in canvas and put that on top scaffolding so that I was able to sit right next to the eagle nest and through a hole in the canvas, I could watch the birds and record everything that they did, but I could also feed them. And it’s really was important to make sure that these birds did not know that I was their caregiver. They had to feel that this food was coming out of nowhere because they weren’t, they didn’t have parents around, but they certainly, we certainly didn’t want them to think that humans were feeding them. Because later on, that would have been very bad for them and for the humans that they would have gone after for the food. So imprinting was very much of our concern.
21:50 – Aaron Perry
So I was hidden from them. They couldn’t see me, but I could see them. Amazing. And this is all around the term hacking, which is new term to me and I was hoping you could explain to our audience what is hacking and how is it related to your story.
22:10 – elizabethmorris
Sure yeah well hacking is a term that is used in falconry and what falconers do is that they take young birds from a nest and they raise them without their parents and they make them they don’t want to imprint to have the birds imprint on them but they also want them to know that they have to come back to a place for their food. And that way they can learn how to hunt for them. So it’s basically raising birds without parents. And there’s lots of different ways of doing it. And it has been done over the last 20, 30, 40 years with various species. But it started really with peregrines and other falcons and falconers really began the whole process. So what we were doing was taking this technique and we were transferring it to the eagles and adjusting it, obviously, because the two species are very different. You’ve got one very large species, the eagle, and quite a small raptor, the peregrine. They have very different feeding habits. The peregrine hunts from the sky. It stoops down, flies down as fast as possible, one of the fastest animals alive, and grabs its prey air and then takes off with it, whereas the eagle usually is either scavenging on the ground, in the case of when it goes after water birds or anything that happens to be available, or it’s going down into the water after fish. But its feeding strategies are very different, they require different, and their reproductive strategies are also very different. Eagles are monogamous, and they mate for life, and that was important. To know, especially later on after they fledged and we wondered what had happened to them. And they live in a nest way up in a tree. And so we had to replicate that, whereas peregrines live in iris, which are usually on ledges or cliff sides. So all those things were a little bit different, and we kind of had to adjust for that.
24:17 – Aaron Perry
Amazing. So now we’ve got you in this. Wetland wilderness and the tower, the platform, the nest, the baby bald eagles are there, you’re there behind a blind. And now you got to be there for several months, right? Through rain and shine, all kinds of weather conditions, mosquitoes. Can you paint us the picture of what that was like, that week after week after week?
24:49 – elizabethmorris
Well, I luckily I had done some camping when I was younger. So it wasn’t a complete different situation for me. The camping part was okay. I had a tent the first year. Unfortunately, the first night, we sort of had a monsoon come along, and the tent blew down and everything that I owned was completely saturated with water. So that started me off in a little bit of the wrong foot. But we kind of dealt with that. I got a new tent, and everything sort of worked out. But I had a campsite, and you know, everything was pretty much like rough camping. And every day, I would go up, climb the ladder up to get to feed the eagles first, and then sit cross-legged in this tiny little blind, all hunched over, watching them through a hole, and recording in my notebook. Now, of course, this was before the age of computers, or cell phones, or anything like that. So I would just be writing down everything that they did in a notebook with a pencil to be able to record so that we’d know whether we were affecting their behavior in the wild. That was the important thing. Were they behaving any differently in this situation than they would have been if they’d had two parents? And so as much as possible, I was basically acting like an invisible parent. I would bring them food twice day, I had to catch fish in the marsh to be able to do that. And that was a little tricky sometimes because the first year it was okay. I had a trap and there were a lot of carp available. So the carp would all come into the trap and I would go and net them. And then I’d bring them back up to the hillside. The nest was on top of a hill that overlooked a marsh, overlooked a big pond in the marsh. And so we knew that once they flew, they would have the pond below them and they could then go down there and they could learn how to hunt. So, I would catch the fish and I had to learn how to kill them. They’re really large and they’re really tough. So, you can imagine trying to catch a three foot, three, yeah, three and a half foot carp but how do you kill it? Easily, quickly, and humanely and I was a real animal lover. I didn’t kill anything. I didn’t like to fish. Because of the that I didn’t want to kill the fish. So I had to get over all of this and realize that this is for the good of the birds. The birds have to eat, I have to kill the fish. So I had to develop a technique that was quick and humane and everything else. So I did that. In terms of living there, the only thing that was a little difficult were there was no shower, there was no bathroom, there was nothing like that. So things got a little bit interesting because I was always covered with fish. And I can’t imagine what I smelled like if people would come up to see me because I couldn’t do anything about it. I finally did get a woman to give me a key to her apartment that was in town, which was about five miles away. And I did take a shower once a week. So I was able to get off the hillside once a week for that. But the rest of the time I was there. And even that trip into town made me so nervous could not enjoy it. I would go and I’d grab some groceries, I’d take my shower and run back to the hillside, because I was so worried that something was going to happen to the birds. It was the feeling, it wasn’t the camping and the being alone, although it did get lonely at times, but it was the responsibility and the feeling that this is the nation’s bird I’m watching. And how am I going to tell people that I lost it, or somehow it died on under my watch or something bad happened to it. And that was in my mind all the time, that feeling of just, I have to make this work.
28:46 – Aaron Perry
Amazing. One of the things I really appreciate about your book, and I’m going to show again, Return to the Sky here for our video audience by Tina Morris, available through Chelsea Green Publishing, you’re so And I would even go so far as to say vulnerable in your writing style, talking about the various feelings and emotions that you had along this journey. And it really, for me, humanized the experience that you’re sharing through the book. And you have a lot of different emotions. It’s incredible. While you’re doing this work. And I’m wondering if it lived with you in a particular way after this phase of your work, the emotionality of the experience. Is that something that you’ve tracked for yourself the ensuing years?
29:57 – elizabethmorris
Well, I, I think everybody keeps telling me that, how could you be so honest in the book? And I guess one of the reasons was that in grad school, I spent a lot of time reading books by various research biologists out in the field, who were studying all kinds of, you know, large mammals and all kinds of things that were dangerous, but very exciting. And I never got the feeling that they were ever in trouble or ever found it difficult or ever bored or ever anything. I just thought this is the most exciting thing you can possibly do, to do field research and be tracking something that’s really large and important, and isn’t this great. And then I did it. And I guess I realized that it’s a little bit of a mystery sometimes when people write about their research and it just sounds a little too good. And it’s, it’s hard. And I think it’s wonderful because you’re finding out all kinds of things. And if you’re in a situation where you’re trying to save a species, it’s incredibly important. And you have to keep patting yourself on the back and saying, I can do this. What I’m doing is really important and I can do it, but it’s not, it’s not a cakewalk. And I think most researchers probably have those feelings, they just didn’t write them down. And I guess that’s the way I felt when I was writing the book, is that I went through it and sort of, you know, it was like, well, I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. And then a couple of people read it and said, but what were you thinking? How did you do that? And I realized that’s what’s missing, is what the fear, the terror, the anxiety, you know, all those feelings I had while I was doing this job and thinking that I might fail at any time. And also that feeling of being incredibly fortunate to have been given this opportunity. It wasn’t like I climbed a ladder to success and finally at the top, here you can do bald eagle research. It didn’t happen. I was just very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And so I felt that that was important to convey in the story. And also, I think I’m a teacher. After I did the Eagle work, I taught for 25 years. It was really important for me to tell, particularly young women, that you can do anything if you want it badly enough. And I wanted to convey that in the book, that somebody who felt like, well, I’m not good enough, or I’m not good at science, or I’m not I’m afraid of heights, or I’m afraid of this, or whatever. You can get over that. You can get over anything. But you’ve got to want it badly enough to keep going.
32:54 – Aaron Perry
And I guess that was part of the message that I was trying to convey. Yeah, that determination certainly comes through. And as you’re talking about the emotionality of the experience, one of the things that just popped in my mind is this great movie, Never Cry Wolf, researcher Farley Mowat out in, I think he was in Alaska or something working with the Bulls. Yeah, Yukon, yeah, someplace like that. Yeah, yeah. And just the antics and the incredible unfolding of the story. And in your case, even the food you’re eating, right, you couldn’t cook. And so the lifestyle is not normal relative to what you were used to up until then.
33:40 – elizabethmorris
Right, no, I didn’t grow up eating out of a can. And that’s what I was doing pretty much all the time. I’ve had people ask me, well, why didn’t you cook things? And I said, well, first of all, at the time, they didn’t have things like freeze-dried camping food that you could just pop in a pot, and it would be this wonderful dinner. That hadn’t been invented yet. I had a one-burner camping stove. And all I could do was heat something up that had already been cooked. And also I had no refrigeration. So there was no fresh produce or anything like that. I couldn’t eat a salad, for example, unless I ate it the day that I went into town to buy the food. But other than that, it was pretty sparse pickings. Luckily, I’m not that picky about my food. And so that really didn’t bother me so much. I got a little hungry when I go into the supermarket at all the food around me. But that wasn’t really that much of a concern for me. The solitude got to me at times when I wouldn’t see people for days at a time and I’d be doing the same thing every day. I mean, the eagles, you know, they were very, very quiet during the day because of the heat. And also that’s what birds do. They hang out during the day and then they get active, you know, in the morning and in the evening. So lots of times I’d just be sitting there looking at them nothing. And so luckily, I’m a reader. So I did read a lot in my little blind. And I would write my notes about, you know, my scribbles that about their behavior, but, and I’d also have to fish, I’d have to go down to the to the pond and catch fish. And I’d also have to pick up roadkill, because I didn’t want them just eating fish, eagles or scavengers. And they have to have a variety of different foods. So I would have to drive the roads around the refuge, looking for dead animals and picking them up and bringing them back and feeding it to the eagles. So I entertained myself in very simple ways, but I hadn’t realized that field research was going to be so solitary, and that you have to deal with loneliness. And I think it was very good to have to do that for a while, to really understand what it’s about.
35:56 – Unidentified Speaker
Amazing.
35:56 – Aaron Perry
Let me remind our audience, this is the on Earth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry, and today we’re visiting with Tina Morris, the author of Return to the Sky, the surprising story of how one woman and seven eaglets helped restore the bald eagle. And you can get a copy of this book at ChelseaGreen.com. If you’d like, you can use the code YOE35 for a 35% discount and a got to give a shout out to Chelsea Green, one of our partners and sponsors. And we’ve got a few others to thank who make our podcast series possible. And this includes Earth Coast Productions, Patagonia’s Home Planet Fund, Profitable Purpose Consulting, Climate First Bank, Bluestone Life Insurance, and of course, our global network of Why on Earth ambassadors. If you’re interested in joining our ambassador network and haven’t yet, you can go to whyonearth.org and just click on the Become an Ambassador page to get your journey started. Now, many of our ambassadors make a monthly donation to support this work, and you’re invited to do the same. If you give at the $33 or greater level per month and you’re in the United States, we will happily send you a jar of our hemp-infused aromatherapy soaking salts from Waylay Waters. With Climate First Bank in particular, we want to emphasize the very important work they’re doing for regenerative projects, residential solar projects, community projects, and they are fast growing right now. We’ve got a special arrangement. If you want to set up a checking account with Climate First Bank, and by the way, You can get yields around 4 to 5% on that. You can go to climatefirstbank.com slash whyonearth and each new account will result in a $100 donation to the Why On Earth community, which is very helpful. And with our banner sponsor, Bluestone Life Insurance, you can get life insurance products that are supporting all the proceeds, all the premiums are supporting sustainable and regenerative equities worldwide and have some special features for family through the life cycle of their insurance products. So a big shout out to all of our sponsors and supporters. And Tina, it’s such a joy having this conversation with you. And you’ve mentioned a couple of things now about this groundbreaking trailblazing work you did as a young woman, and you as a teacher have inspired many other young women. And early in your career, you were often the only woman in a very male-dominated scenario. It reminds me of the interview we did with Dr. Elaine Ingham, the very well-known soil scientist, who early in her career was also essentially the only woman. Can you tell us a bit about what that was like and what you had to, in addition to all the academic rigor, all of the hardships and struggle of being out day after day after day in the woods, you had to deal with this additional layer of gender dynamics, right?
39:38 – elizabethmorris
Right. To a certain degree. I mean, I have to say that the men that I worked with, especially the Cornell biologists, never made me feel that I was any different. And they were so careful to, well, maybe they weren’t being careful. Maybe they didn’t even think about it. I don’t know. But I never felt that they were making exceptions for me or that they were helping me more than they would have if I’d been a male. They were just wanting me to succeed. They wanted the birds to be able to make it. And they were doing the best job they could to make sure that they filled me with the information needed to take care of them. So I never felt that I was any different when I was out there working. The only group that I had trouble with, because of being a woman, were the media. And the first year, that was fine. It didn’t matter because the whole project was a top secret. Nobody was supposed to know we were even doing this project because nobody knew if it was going to work. And because the Eagles were so high profile, the government didn’t want to announce that we were this amazing thing and then have them not make it. So everything was sort of kept under wraps and nobody knew where the eagles were. The refuge closed the whole area off. Public wasn’t allowed anywhere near the hillside. In fact, I used to talk to the fishermen down on the pond, and especially the second year, I needed their fish because there was a drought and I was having trouble getting food. And they didn’t even know. That something was going on up there on the ridge, they saw the tower, but they didn’t know what was happening. So in that sense, I think that, you know, the first year was sort of a honeymoon, I was really left alone. And that had, you know, it was a little scary being up there, I had my two dogs, and luckily, one of them was a German shepherd, and he was pretty, pretty protective of me. So I, I was, I was safe. But there were people that were wandering around from time to time. The second year, all of a sudden, because the two birds of the first year had successfully left the refuge and were finding their own food, all of a sudden, New York State announced that this program was actually happening. And what that meant was that all the reporters from all the New York papers, including the New York Times, were coming up to do interviews. And I wasn’t prepared for that. But I especially wasn’t prepared for being the story of their interviews. In other words, when they wanted, they took a lot of pictures and I just assumed they were taking pictures of the site and the person who was doing the work. But then when they decided they wanted to put me on the cover of the Sunday magazine, all by myself, without any eagles anywhere near me, because the story was all about this woman living alone on a hillside and wasn’t this incredible. I just said, no, I’m not the story. Take a picture of the Eagles and put them on the cover because that is what you need to do in order to be able to publicize that they are now being reintroduced. And they didn’t. They took a picture of some other woman and put her on the cover and then made the story all about me. And I just thought that that was sort of for me, that was really what said, yes, you are a female, and it is an interesting world to be in. But there is a difference in minds of some people, but not others. So I guess that was my biggest experience was through the media.
43:20 – Aaron Perry
Yeah, it’s so interesting. And in that part of the book, you engage in this sort of tension and conflict around not wanting to be in the spotlight as a opposed to the Eagles, but also recognizing over time that, as you put it, I think charisma is good for conservation. And there’s this dance around the publicity piece and raising awareness. And it’s interesting, right? Because it’s not a black and white issue. And in some respects, your humility comes across as well. It’s like, you don’t want this to be about you. You want this to be about the Eagles. But you also engage in a discussion in the book raising awareness is ultimately a very important objective in this work.
44:05 – Unidentified Speaker
Right.
44:06 – elizabethmorris
And I think that looking back, I was 26 and I was very, very naive about a lot of things. And I hadn’t really figured out who I was. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, a lot of people say this is really a coming of age book, not just the Eagles coming of age, but also the researcher coming of age. And had I to do it again, I probably would have been a lot friendlier to those media people, and a lot more talking about the story, and gotten them to put things out there directly that I wanted them to say, but I was so worried about being the center of attention, that I didn’t use that opportunity. And I guess now almost 50 years later, I don’t have a problem using that opportunity. And I don’t want to be able to talk to people about what happened, because I don’t want it to happen again to any birds. I think we have to be incredibly mindful of bird populations in general and wildlife in general. And the only way to do that is to basically share stories like this, that these kinds of things happened, and they could happen again. And, you know, you just have to, to make the public more, more aware of what’s around them. So I guess age does have its advantages when you look back on what you should have done when you were younger.
45:34 – Aaron Perry
Well, and this was an incredibly successful restoration and recovery program for the bald eagle, but we’re not out of the woods necessarily, so to speak. There are potentially new threats and concerns and issues that we’ll get to. I want to be sure to about that. However, before going there, I would love for you to describe for our audience just how tremendous the impact was with this program in the restoration of bald eagle populations. If you could just walk us through what happened in those ensuing years.
46:14 – Unidentified Speaker
Sure.
46:14 – elizabethmorris
That’s a great question, Aaron, because I think that But what I did was just the very beginning, the first two years. And I think thanks to the Peregrine team and people like Tom Cade and Jim Weaver and the people that work with them, we were able to develop the techniques that would work. And it was trial and error. We didn’t know what we were doing with eagles, never been done before. And so, you know, we would try things the first year that may not have worked that well. Then the second year, we’d kind of refine And in the meantime, I’m supposed to be writing a thesis about all of this. And it was kind of turned into a manual of this is how you hack bald eagles. And I didn’t really think about it at the time, I wanted to get my degree. And that was the reason I was writing the thesis. But it turned out that that thesis became the sort of the how to book for how do you do hacking. And a lot of States started to do it. And so in 1978, New York State took over from us. And Cornell kind of took a backseat. Jim Weaver still served as an advisor to them. But the Department of Environmental Conservation really took over the program. And they did it for many years after that and released many birds into the sky in different places, not just in Montezuma. They moved on to several other locations. But then nine other states picked it up. And all the way down to Tennessee, which actually hacked birds until 2020. So a lot of birds were put out there. And as it turned out, bald eagles disperse. They migrate, they move from one place to another, they establish nests, not necessarily where they were born, but in other states. And it was an incredible success story because we went from 417 pairs in 1963 to more than 72,000 pairs in the lower 48 in 2023. So that kind of tells you how successful in terms of population growth, the bald eagle was in his ability to go into all these other places and find once DDT was gone, there was no stopping him. But we had to give him a nudge. And I think that I saw the hacking project that we did as the nudge and then everybody else picked it up. So it was a really, it was a success story. Absolutely. When you look at the numbers, you can’t believe that a bird could come back that dramatically to the point where people are saying, oh, I see them all the time. They’re like pigeons. Those are people usually living in places like Minnesota or even in Maine, sometimes around the lakes and things like that. They see a lot of eagles. But that was unheard of back then. If you saw a bald eagle in your lifetime, it was a big deal. And you’d get really excited. And now people are living in places where they see them almost daily. So yes, it was a huge success. And I can’t say enough about the fact that everybody felt really good about it. And it’s something that to hold up. We’ve had a lot of failures in terms of conservation, but this one was very much of a good thing.
49:33 – Unidentified Speaker
How wonderful.
49:34 – Aaron Perry
And so 417 pairs in 1963, 72,000 pairs in 2023? That’s just in lower 48. That doesn’t include Alaska.
49:44 – elizabethmorris
And Alaska has about 30% of all of the total numbers of bald eagles as the lower 48. So in Alaska, they really are everywhere. They were doing well back then because DDT was never sprayed in Alaska, so it didn’t take a toll, but they’re doing even better now. So, yeah.
50:08 – Aaron Perry
Well, out here where I am in Colorado, we see them with some frequency and regularity, and I still, each and every time, whether it’s the bald or the golden eagle, am delighted to have that blessing and presence in the day. And look, clearly the work you’ve done with the bald eagle is of great import in terms of the symbolic representation of this nation. And it’s also of great import to many different indigenous peoples and traditions. And as your work helps set in motion this incredible restoration success, not only did media take note, but of course, so did some of the chiefs and elder women and grandmothers of the Iroquois Nation, the Confederacy of Six Nations, the Haudenosaunee, the people of the Longhouse from that region of New York. And they ended up bestowing an incredible honor on you, to recognize the importance of your work with the Bald Eagle, which is they inducted you as an honorary Haudenosaunee, an honorary Iroquois. Wow, that’s incredible. And I love in the book that you describe the experience, again, with the men and the women playing somewhat different roles in that day. And I love too that there are some great photos in the book from that day, special day. Can you tell us a bit about what happened, how that unfolded, and how you were feeling with that incredible honor?
51:57 – elizabethmorris
Well, I think it all began with a letter that I got in my mailbox when one day I went back to Ithaca to collect my mail. It was the end of 1977 and the birds had left the refuge by then, so I was commuting back and forth just putting fish on the came back or couldn’t find food. I wanted to make sure they had they had something there. And there was a letter from the chief of the Seneca Nation. And it asked me if I would come to Syracuse for the New York State Fair to be inducted into the Iroquois Confederacy. And I immediately thought, Oh, my goodness, I can’t possibly do that. That sounds like I’m going to be the center of attention again. And I don’t want to do that. And then I thought, but I can’t not do that. I mean, this is so incredible. Of course, I have to go. So I got my courage up, and I went up there, and it was in early September. And I arrived at the Indian village at the state fair, and I sort of found my way to where I was supposed to be. And I spent the entire day with the six nations, the chiefs and other members of the six nations, including the six wives, and also the Indian princess, who is basically honored every year from a different tribe. And in that year, she was from the Seneca tribe. Each year, each tribe takes the responsibility for the fair for that year. And it was the Seneca’s year. So she was wonderful girl, 16 years old, couldn’t have been nicer. And she was sort of assigned to make sure that I was going in the right direction and doing what I was supposed to do. I had a meal with them, and we talked, and they showed me all of the things that they were making, because they’re exhibiting a lot of the handicrafts that each tribe makes. Each one is sort of famous for something. And then it came time for the ceremony. And I had no idea what we were going to be doing, but we were on a stage, and all lined up around me and the wives were sort of around them and suddenly the chiefs backed up and they went to the edge of the stage and the wives came forward and they had all these gifts to give me. So they gave me all the gifts and then they put a headdress on me with an eagle feather, which was very special because I knew that only the indigenous people could have eagle feathers. It’s illegal for anyone else to have them. And they then recited all the things to do with the ceremony about the history of how the honorary Iroquois came to be and why they picked somebody who had had a major effect on the tribe in some way or on the Confederacy. And because of my work with bald eagles and their reverence of bald eagles, they used them for all of their feathers for all of their, their traditions and dances and everything. But they also revere the bird. In general, they have a very strong feeling about this bird. And I was, I didn’t understand really anything, except I was very glad that these women were around me and I was being honored in this way. And it wasn’t until the end when everybody sort of disbanded. The wife of that Seneca chief came up to me, and I was quite a bit taller than she was, I had to bend down to hear her, but she kind of whispered, thank you for coming today. Because because you were willing to have us give you this honor, you honored us, because this is the first time in history ever been able to be part of the ceremony. And it was because you were a female, and you’re the first ever honored as an Iroquois. So that of made the whole thing so worthwhile that I thought everything was being given to me. And yet I found out I was able to give back to them. And I found that really amazing. Since then, I’ve looked up who the honorary people are from year to year. And there have been more women that were chosen, not too many, but a few. So I guess I broke a barrier somewhere along the way. And it meant a lot to them.
56:26 – Unidentified Speaker
How beautiful.
56:27 – Aaron Perry
What a wonderful honoring. I am so happy that we have this opportunity to visit today, Tina, and I want to really encourage folks to check out your book, Return to the Sky. You can go to chelseagreen.com, and if you’d like, use the code YOE35 for a 35% percent discount. We’ll of course include these links and this information in the show notes for the episode. And before wrapping up I want to be sure to talk about some of the new potential threats that we’re that we’re dealing with now. Right, because I think it would be incomplete to tell the story and not have this part of this discussion, even though it might be a little bit of a downer, maybe not quite as happy a topic as some of the other we’ve been talking about.
57:31 – elizabethmorris
Yeah, I think it’s important. I mean, I know that the program was a tremendous success, and we can really enjoy that part of it. And also, it shows that you can put birds back, or you can put back into the wild, and that is being done quite often now, both in the U.S. But also in Europe. The rewilding of certain animals, reintroducing particularly predators that we’ve managed to kill off for so long, are now being able to be put back. It’s tricky, it’s very tricky, because not everybody loves predators, and you have to be careful to make sure that you’re putting them in the right place places. But in the case of the eagle, I think we have to be aware that we can’t take our eye off the ball. And yes, they are doing very well right now, but they’re already facing some problems. There are things like lead, for example, that are in the shot that are in hunter’s rifles. They don’t all use lead by any means. A lot of them have switched over because they’ve realized how bad it is, but there’s still lot of lead out there, and the eagles will pick that up when they pick up a waterfowl, a duck or something like that, and there’s lead in the body. The eagles will ingest it in other ways as well, and it’s poisonous, and it will end up killing them. They start losing weight and they can’t reproduce anymore, and then they would die. There’s also things just like shooting. There was an eagle shot in a neighboring state just last week, so shooting still exists. It’s totally illegal, and there are huge fines for it, but it still happens. Vehicle death. In the book, I talk about one of my eagles that was found, that was hit by a truck. He was found by the side of the road. As it turned out, he was the oldest living eagle ever known. And he was 38 years old by the time he was hit, but he was still a victim of vehicle death. Disease and chemicals, things like rodenticides, for example, the people put in their barns and around their farms and in their houses. The rodents eat them, the eagle eats the rodent, and the eagle will die from it. Wind farms can be a problem if they’re put in areas where a lot of eagles are nesting, because the young birds are very clumsy, they can’t fly very well, and they can’t avoid the big paddles that go around. I think one of the biggest problems, while habitat and climate change are always a problem for everything. But one of the biggest problems that eagles are facing right now is avian flu and almost 600 eagles were basically killed by avian flu in 45 states in the last few years. So it’s taking its toll and even places like Minnesota that have more eagles than any place in the lower 48 have found that the reproductive success of eagles has been affected by that. So know avian flu is definitely a consideration and we just have to be very careful about you know not not allowing ourselves to get too complacent I think that’s what it’s really all about and bird birds in general are declining and we just we we don’t really know why we don’t know all the reasons but we have to be aware of it absolutely yeah yeah thanks for walking us through that and one of my friends and colleagues is
1:01:03 – Aaron Perry
doing a lot of work around the avian flu issue right now, and there’s definitely a lot going on. You know, I am just so happy we could visit and talk about your incredible story with the bald eagles in your book, and wanted to ask, you know, your ingenuity working with them in the 70s really comes through with this special tool you invented the blue jean leg, which you used to secure the birds when you needed to put tags on them or whatever it was for identification purposes. And I’m trying to picture the scene, right, of holding a large bird with incredibly sharp, dangerous talons and fierce beak and powerful wings flapping. And can you just kind of like zoom us right in, take us up close, close and personal, what that was like,
1:02:02 – elizabethmorris
Well, I realized that I was going to be alone up there a lot. And when I had to tag them and put radio transmitters on them, I usually had help. And Jim Weaver, for example, would often help me because he knew what he was doing and I didn’t. So the two of us would work together. But there were times when I was alone. And particularly when once the Eagles fledged, they were clumsy, as I said, and they did not know how to fly. They kind of were like an out-of-control helicopter, and they would spiral off the tower, thinking that they were going to be able to fly, and they couldn’t. They couldn’t become airborne, and so they went right down into the marsh, and they went down into four or five foot tall cattails, and it was surrounded by water, and then they got stuck. And if I had been a female eagle or a male eagle, even it doesn’t matter, the parents both take care of the young, I would have been able to go down there and perch near them and just drop fish for them until they were strong enough to get themselves out. But I wasn’t. So that meant that I had to go catch them. And I had needed a way to be able to catch them in the marsh without getting raked over by their talons and their beak. So I tried different things and nothing worked. They seemed to unravel any body wrap I could come up with. And then I looked down at my leg and I well, wait a minute, what about my blue jeans? My leg of my blue jeans could work like a straight jacket. So I cut my blue jean leg off and it worked perfectly. It was exactly the right shape for an eagle that’s kind of wide at the top and then it narrows down. And I could put them inside the blue jean sleeve. And the only thing that was exposed were their talons, which I could wrap with electrical tape so they couldn’t move them. And their beak, but the blue jeans could go over their head. And so they couldn’t see. And if they can’t see, they don’t bother you. It’s like any bird, if you put a blanket over a parakeet, it stops everything. It stops singing, it stops, it’s very quiet. They don’t like not being able to see. So it worked really well. And that was my go-to apparatus. So I would go into the marsh, I’d grab him inside the sleeve, wrap him all up, haul him back to the car that I had to drive to get back up to the tower, and then I had to get him up to the top of the tower, which meant that I had to climb with the bird in my arms. So he was still wrapped up, I’d hold him like a football, and I would climb with one hand back up to the tower and then unwrap him and put him back in the nest and give him a short lecture about, now why don’t you just stay here for a couple of days until you get a little stronger before you do that again. But they never listened, so I was always back in the marsh a few hours later. But that was the most scary time that I had with the birds, that I was afraid of losing them.
1:05:01 – Aaron Perry
But the blue jean sleeve came in very handy. Amazing, amazing. Well, it’s such a joy visiting with you today, Tina. And of course, after our main podcast interview, we’re going to have a short behind-the-scenes chat for our Ambassador Network. Again, folks, if you’d like to join our Ambassador Network and haven’t yet done so, you can go to whyonearth.org and just click on the Become an Ambassador page to connect in with the group that way and gain access to many of our additional resources like our behind-the-scenes segments with our podcast guests. And so we’ll be doing that in just a few moments, Tina, but before signing off here, I just want to open the floor up to you. If there’s anything else you’d like to say or share with our audience, please, my friend, the floor is yours.
1:05:51 – elizabethmorris
Oh, thank you. Well, this has been a real privilege, Aaron, to talk to your audience and to you. I love sharing the story. I love talking to people about it because I have found that very few people really know it. I think there was a lot of misunderstandings, particularly since almost years has passed. And people, especially, you know, younger people, or they don’t even have to be that young. They just, they didn’t know that eagles weren’t always here. And they didn’t understand how hard people had to work to bring back these birds. And I think one of the reasons I decided to write the story was to basically let people know that there were men out there, these falconers, who were so dedicated to the cause, to bring back the birds, and to bring back wildlife in general, not just falconers, but everyone who was working with wildlife. And they really do deserve a big round of applause for having done that. And I think people assume that things have been there for a while, but they don’t know all the work that was put into it to bring them back. So I’m very happy to talk to audiences about that and let people know exactly the way things were 50 years ago. It was an interesting time. And it was a very important decade, the 1970s, to allow the Earth to come back. And I just hope we can not have it go back down again. We’ve got to really take care of it. And it’s got to be a concerted effort amongst all of us to do that.
1:07:25 – Aaron Perry
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tina. It’s been an absolute joy visiting with you.
1:07:30 – elizabethmorris
Well, thank you. Thank you for listening.
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