The Pearl 2020

Eagle’s Nest
Spencer Willits
Bald eagles are carrion birds. They’re serene and graceful only when
killing, but more often they follow the path of least resistance and feed off
whatever corpses are the freshest. They circle freeways like buzzards and pick
off whatever roadkill they can keep from the ravens. They are beautiful birds,
it’s been many years since I saw them as pure or noble.
Every spring my mother and I would go on a daytrip along the Mississippi
to see the eagles right as the ice went out on the river. While most
northern birds fly to tropical vacations for the winter, bald eagles tough it out
and weather the cold like true Minnesotans. I can give them that credit at
least. When the ice thaws, seems like every eagle in the state breaks their fast
on fish still sleepy from the cold as we watched from the safety of the highway
overlook. Even then, these were birds of blood and claw, and the image
of an eagle with dead things has never been a strange one to me.
It was the day after after a particularly bad storm in the Twin Cities
that I went on a bike ride. Mississippi River Blvd was barricaded by fallen
oaks, whose branches and trunks clogged the street atop the bluff. The scenic
bike path gave me a scene I wasn’t expecting. As a ten-year-old boy I got off
my biked and carried it over the debris of an old oak which had spewn its
contents all across the asphalt. City response workers with bright orange vests
and chainsaws were already cutting up the trees and hauling it out of the
road, but they didn’t get there in time stop me seeing what the tree had
spilled. An eagle’s nest, big as a treehouse, was cracked open like an egg on
the pavement. The inhabitants must have escaped in the night to slink off in
the storm, but their leftovers were clear for all of us to see that grey morning.
Spilled across the street like the contents of a hastily emptied purse were
what must have been shy of a hundred pet collars.
There have always been eagles in the Twin Cities. There have always
been fish in the Mississippi, rodents in the woods, and roadkill to keep them
plump. The concrete jungle is little different from any other forest to them;
an ecosystem ripe with small mammals. Most of the creatures they eat are
dead already. A cat loses a fight to the raccoons in the alley and doesn’t
make it till morning, and its body is never found until the collar turns up in
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