Puffs

I’ll probably get back to politics later, but I wanted to give the American Bald Eagle a little publicity to start this week. This inclination came from two events last week.

First: Nancy and I make our share of trips to Hastings every week for medical visits and other reasons. It doesn’t happen every trip, but we do see eagles (usually near the Little Blue River) every once in a while. See them is usually a surprise and by the time we come to the conclusion that bird was actually an eagle, it is gone out of sight.

During a warm day last week, while Nancy was doing physical therapy, the facility had an outside door open to help keep the temperature and humidity at a reasonable level. While there another lady said: “My gosh, that’s an eagle.”

As near as they could tell, it might have been swooping down over Lake Hastings, rising up and repeating the downward dives before it disappeared.

Secondly: The other reason I thought of giving the eagle a little publicity is that over the weekend I watched a little TV news broadcast about the eagle.

The show was about a book recently written about the eagle. One of the points made on the program was the American eagle has made quite a ‘come-back’ from being close to extinction in the last 50 years or so. Also, the eagle likes isolated areas, definitely away from populated areas.

That little bit of information seemed like common sense to me as everything I’ve read over the past 50 years or so was that the eagles’ repopulation in America has always started in rural areas. Alaska was always home to many eagles as it had vast areas where no people lived. In the lower states and Canada the come-back was always in rural areas.

However, the TV program noted the eagle will adapt. It showed eagles building nests on cell phone towers.

So, maybe seeing eagles in Hastings was not as unusual as it was supposed to be.

I’m not sure how many people remember the mid 1900s, but that is about the time so many people started to realize we humans were doing things that did great harm to the environment. And doing it when alternatives were available. Two of the species of life I remember most were the American eagle and the Whooping Crane.

Over the past 50 or 60 years I’ve enjoyed reading of the progress the eagle and crane have made in survival numbers after we humans made changes in practices that were killing those birds.

I have no numbers of the increase in numbers of eagles, but the sightings of the bird over the past 25 years is astounding and seeing them in a populated area like Hastings give credence to their revival.

The Whooping Crane is an even more interesting situation. By the 1940s only about 20+ cranes were alive, living in the wild, migrating from Texas to Canada. In America’s frontier days, they were so numerous they were often hunted for food and with the introduction of farming in the Midwest, their numbers were reduced.

In the last 80 years or so, the numbers have increase to where there are more than 400 in the wild and another 160+ in captivity. They slowly are growing in numbers and I’ve found it interesting to watch it all happen. I feel sad upon reading of deaths of any Whooping Crane and rejoice on reading of the improvement of the flock and work it takes to help them survive.

Sandhill Cranes: With the annual migration through Nebraska and the tourist attraction they provide, not much more needs to be said. They seem to be surviving quite well.

The simple things in life sometimes become quite complicated. For example, it seems no hunting limits exist for Snow Geese. Hunting of the bird is encouraged and part of that encouragement is because the breeding ground in Canada is so overpopulated. It does not provide enough cover and feed for the number of geese there are.

However, when you read about the 300 or so, Snow Geese that were found in Nebraska a week or so ago, it makes a person wonder. Yes, someone dumped about 300 dead geese along the side of a road and no one knows the reason.

That’s a lot of good eating gone to waste, and for what reason, nobody knows.

A O

The reasons for WWII were pretty well known in the 1940s. Korea as well in the 1950s. Viet Nam maybe a little less known in the 1960s. The mid-east and Afghanistan maybe a little less known than that.

Ukraine . . . it seems everyone is guessing just why Russia and Mr. Putin have started this war. There have been many suggestions as the reasons Putin began the war. They may all be correct, or partially correct. I’m not sure if anyone knows the reason.

One thing I do find interesting is the reaction of certain people.

In the 1960s while I was in college and working part time, I worked with a young man who was greatly opposed to the Viet Nam war. He had all kinds of reasons to be against it, some may have been understandable, but some were just wild.

What I found interesting was the fact he rarely listened to any arguments that did not agree with what he believed. On one occasion President Johnson was to give a speech about the war and I wanted to listen to it on the radio. This person objected as he thought nothing new could be learned.

Today, 55 or 60 years later, I hear of people who really won’t listen to any coverage of the war in Ukraine. They all have their reasons, I’m sure, but I get the impression they are not unlike the young man from the 1960s who just did not want to listen to any facts. He had his ideas and nothing anyone could say would change them.

I’m certainly not perfect, but yes, I do listen to FOX news, usually in the morning. However, I then listen to the other national media in the evening to try to get a balance input of whatever news they decide to publish. In between that, I also try to read newspaper publications as well.

With the approaching elections for 2022, I will again urge you to get your information from as many sources as possible.

A O