Column: Libby-Troy area is great place for watching eagles

My interest in birds dates back to a zoology class I took during my sophomore year of college. Over the course of the semester, we carried around our bird books to help with identification and compiled a list of each species we spotted.

Although years later I enjoyed watching California condors, my favorite has always been the bald eagle. At home in the living room, I have two pieces of artwork featuring eagles and upon my first visit to Libby last year, I took immediate notice of the eagles designed by Todd Berget.

To my enjoyment, I’ve seen more bald eagles here in northwestern Montana over the past few months than I have at any other time in my life. Last week alongside Highway 2, I saw a pair on the ground side-by-side. A few days later while on the way to a Troy basketball game, I spotted a beauty flying overhead. Just this week, I found a cool shot of an eagle in my e-mail in-box that one of our employees, Paul Sievers, photographed on his way home from work (see the front page for that photo).

Bald eagles once dominated North America with estimates before European settlement as high as 500,000. When more and more people arrived, spread westward and dipped into the eagle’s food supply while disrupting habitat, numbers began to dwindle. By the late 1800s to early 1900s, the bald eagle’s survival was in question.

Today, an estimated 70,000 bald eagles live around the world with about half of those in Alaska. You can attribute that to all of the available salmon.

Here in Montana, the bald eagle population has improved. According to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, between 1978 and 1995, the number of known breeding pairs increased from 12 to 166. The most recent number I could find was 300 nesting pairs in 2007 – that coming from the American Bird Conservancy.

Most bald eagles can be found on our end of the state because of the milder climate and all the rivers.

The bald eagle has definitely become a patriotic symbol of America. That all started back in 1782 when the Second Continental Congress adopted the bald eagle as the United States’ national emblem. Anywhere in the world, when you see a bald eagle, you think America.

By the way, Benjamin Franklin suggested that America adopt another bird for the national emblem – wild turkey. Could you imagine? It’s the World Series and during the playing of the national anthem, instead of an eagle flying into the stadium and landing on the arm of its trainer, a turkey trots out onto the diamond.

I think the Continental Congress made the right choice.

(Brad Fuqua is managing editor of The Western News. He can be reached at: thewesternnews@gmail.com ).