Bald Eagles Seem To Be Landing

The eagles have landed! Yes — but not successfully.

A bunch of Long Island-based eagles have bitten the dust lately, the last just the other day at the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays. It is presently undergoing testing at a laboratory, and we should have the results shortly. The dreaded “bird flu” is the suspected culprit.

You may remember that a column I wrote just last year mentioned a case of avian influenza traced to visiting mallard ducks that were suspected as the culprit, which wiped out a local Sag Harbor game farm’s stock of birds and closed down a long-standing hunting club for good.

Our national bird is not having an easy time of it reestablishing itself on Long Island after an absence of three-quarters of a century. Normally, eagles are comparatively long-lived. The oldest bald eagle on record lived to be 38 years old; the oldest golden eagle, 46 years old. The oldest birds, however, live a great deal longer: A Laysan albatross lived to be more than 70, while a species of parrot, a pet macaw named Charlie, lived to be at least 114 years.

The longest-lived among us, however, are not parrots. Jonathan, a giant Seychelles Island land tortoise, is still going at 190 years of age.

How could any organism live to be that old? Apparently, Greenland sharks can live to be even older. Only seven years ago, a female was studied and found to be 400 years old. The former record-holder was a bowhead whale’s 211 years of age.

But the oldest of animals is not among the biggest. Recently, some scientists counted the rings on an ocean quahog and discovered that it was still alive at 507 years of age.

Remember the fable “The Turtle and the Hare”? The hare was much faster, but the turtle, a plodder, won the race between them, by not fooling around, by steady plodding. The ocean quahog has never been clocked in a race, but I guarantee that the average box turtle could beat it in a race by several lengths. In this case, the oldest is the slowest.

Some land animals are remarkable in that they attain speeds of more than 50 mph. The African lion can run that fast, but another large African cat, the cheetah, can run even faster, up to 75 mph. It is the fastest runner of all.

An American antelope, the pronghorn, is the second-fastest runner of all. It can reach a speed of more than 60 mph. A quarter horse ran at a record speed of 55 mph, 6 mph faster than thoroughbred Secretariat’s top speed.

But no land animal can run as fast as a bird can fly. A swift, white-throated needletail can reach 105 mph in level flight, while the red-breasted merganser, the fastest duck, can reach 100 mph. But look out! The peregrine falcon is the fastest of all, diving for prey at a speed of 186 mph.

The bar-tailed godwit, a bird of America’s Northwest, is not that fast, but no bird flies longer “nonstop.” It breeds in the American Arctic, but juveniles fly all the way to New Zealand, more than 8,000 miles, to overwinter.

Another long-distance flier, and now the champion of all long-distance flying insects, including the monarch butterfly, is a dragonfly, Pantala flavescens, barely an inch in length. It flies all the way from India to East Africa and back each year, 2,500 miles each way.

We humans, who speak, smoke, drive automobiles, dance, write books, and fight to the death with guns and knives, have a lot of “firsts” and “onlys” to our name, “Homo sapiens,” but we are far from the best — in each and every category of activity. We still have a long way to go!