“If it were my purpose to give you a systematic and scientific account of birds, instead of acquainting you with the various species useful to agriculture, I ought to have begun with birds that hunt by day and to have postponed my talks on those that hunt by night; in other words, the eagle, the falcon, and the hawk should have been described first. But should you ask me why, I should be rather at a loss for a satisfactory answer. For want of a better let us content ourselves with this one: the first do their work by day, the second at night. But the eagle and the others of that group live at our expense, while the horned owl and its kind render us a great service by holding in check what would else be a disastrous multiplication of rodents. Consequently, in point of usefulness, the night-bird comes first.
“But this is contrary to all usage, both scientific and popular, which puts the eagle first in the list of birds. Do we not say of the eagle that it is the king of birds? Why has this title been given to the fierce bandit, the murderer of lambs? I should be puzzled to answer this question did I not know man’s inclination to glorify brute strength even though he [[130]]himself may be its victim. You, my children, will find that out only too soon, to your sorrow. Plunder on a grand scale appeals, alas, to something in our faulty human nature that makes us excuse it; nay, more, that makes us glorify it; whereas productive toil, useful to all, leaves us cold or even disdainful. The falcon is a ravisher of our hen-houses, a bloodthirsty marauder of our dove-cotes; and we hold it in high esteem, calling it a noble bird. Shall we, then, never learn to judge animals and men by their true worth, their real usefulness? Let us hope that as so many fine minds have worked, are working, and always will work to bring about this miracle, you, my children, will some day follow their example. Work for this end with all your power, and blessings be upon you if you succeed in giving some additional strength, however little it may be, to this common effort put forth by all men of light and leading.
“I shall discuss but briefly the birds of prey whose activities are confined to the daylight hours. They are nearly all bandits, nothing else, living at our cost by robbery and murder. From the fact that they hunt by day, never at night, they are called diurnal or day birds of prey. The brightest light does not dazzle them. It is even said of the eagle and others of this class that they can look straight at the sun, and this is credited to them as an added title of nobility. But there is no great merit in this performance when once you know how they shade [[131]]their eyes in accomplishing it. They have three eyelids to each eye: first, two like ours, an upper and a lower, which close in sleep, and then a third, which is semi-transparent and is withdrawn completely into the corner of the eye when the bird has no use for it, but when needed comes out from under the other two, which remain open, and serves as a curtain. If the light is too bright or the bird wishes to look toward the sun, it has merely to draw over the eye this third eyelid, this eye-shade, through the semi-transparency of which the rays of light enter the pupil in a much subdued intensity. There you have the whole secret of the eagle’s bold look in facing the sun.”
Golden Eagle
“I could do as much if I shaded my eyes with a curtain,” Emile declared.
“All these birds are furnished with a very strong beak having hooked mandibles for dismembering their prey. Their claws are composed of four separate talons to each foot, three of these talons pointing forward and one backward. The talons are long, recurved, and grooved on the under side, the grooves having sharp edges that they may the better cut into flesh. The eagle’s bearing is bold, its looks stern, and its flight marvelously powerful. Eagles like to circle about in the air, to soar with [[132]]scarcely a movement of the wings in the upper regions of the atmosphere beyond our view. Nevertheless, even from this immense height they can distinguish what is taking place on the earth’s surface below. They explore every farm with their piercing eyes and inspect every poultry-yard. Let a suitable prey show itself, and instantly the bird swoops down with whistling wing, faster than lead would fall. The unwary fowl is snatched from under the farmer’s very eyes.
“Fortunately, the eagle, the chief of these bandits, is a very rare bird. In form it is large, measuring a meter and more from the tip of the beak to the tip of the tail, and it is covered with brown plumage. Its extended wings measure a span of nearly three meters. Its fierce eye, overshadowed by a very prominent eyebrow, glows with a somber fire. The eagle’s nest is known as its aery, and is flat instead of bowl-shaped like other birds’ nests. It is a sort of solid floor made of interwoven twigs and covered with a bed of rushes and heather. It is commonly placed on the face of some steep and forbidding precipice and between two rocks, the upper one of which overhangs and forms a kind of roof for the nest. The eggs, two in number—sometimes, though rarely, three—are of a dingy white spotted with red. The young eaglets are so greedy that at the time of their rearing the aery is strewn with bits of bleeding flesh. Some neighboring ledge of rock serves the parents as slaughter-house and cutting-up bench. It is there that the hares and rabbits, [[133]]partridges and ducks, lambs and kids, seized in the plains and carried in rapid flight to the lofty heights where the eagle makes its home, are torn to pieces in order to be fed to the ever-hungry eaglets.”
“Is the eagle really strong enough,” asked Emile, “to carry off a lamb like that? I had heard it, but couldn’t believe it.”
“Nothing is less open to doubt,” his uncle assured him. “It would carry you off if it found you alone in the mountains.”