The persecution of birds competing with human predators has a long and 
continuing history.  Milton Trautman says of the peregrine falcon in 
“The Birds of Buckeye Lake, Ohio” that “[d]uring the last 6 years of 
investigation [1928-1934] state and public organizations and individuals 
expended considerable effort to kill this species whenever possible.” He 
also describes wildlife managers handing out free boxes of shotgun 
shells to encourage the shooting of owls. Among hunters given permission 
to pursue game on a farmer’s land, it was considered a return of the 
favor to shoot every raptor seen. Trautman was himself a hunter.
        The bald eagle has not to my knowledge suffered any state-sponsored 
persecution in the state. This is no doubt due to its totemic status as 
a government symbol, its preference for eating carrion over chasing 
game, and secondarily the statutory protection of migratory birds since 
1918. Still, gunners in the early days killed plenty of them, regarding 
them as just another bird of prey. The OSU museum has eight specimens: 
three have no or inconclusive data, but four of them were shot, and 
another taken in a trap baited with a dead catfish.
        Fond of water and of fish, Ohio eagles were said to be concentrated 
along Lake Erie in the old days, with others along the Ohio River 
(Alexander Wilson recounts a story of eagles chasing off vultures from 
the carcasses of migrating squirrels drowned there). Little is known of 
their numbers at the time. Persecution and disturbance drove them from 
populated areas during the nineteenth century; Kirtland in 1850 
described the shooting of a female nesting near his home in present-day 
Lakewood. He did not lament it in print, but rather accepted the customs 
of his day.
        The construction of canal reservoirs during mid-century attracted pairs 
to nest farther inland, where their persecution persisted. Peterjohn in 
“The Birds of Ohio” reports that 11-15 pairs nested in the state during 
the mid-twentieth century, their reproduction hampered largely by DDT 
contamination. Since then the banning of DDT, along with protection and 
management of remaining birds, has resulted in over 150 nesting pairs in 
the state today. It is impossible to be sure, but present numbers may 
exceed those of Ohio in prehistoric times.
        This is a familiar story, of course. And it has a happy ending, unlike 
a similar story, not so often told, of another water-loving predator, 
the double-crested cormorant. Much of its history closely parallels that 
of the bald eagle. There is not much evidence of its actual numbers in 
the early days either (though see some recent historical research at 
http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1675/1524-4695%282006%2929%5B9%3AHPOTDC%5D2.0.CO%3B2 
  ), but like eagles they promptly expanded their range to the new canal 
reservoirs in the mid-nineteenth century. Soon they too were shot as 
competitors and used as target practice. Their numbers, too, reached a 
nadir with the use of organochlorine pesticides a hundred years later, 
but like eagles returned to the Lake and former inland locations, and 
newly colonized others, after DDT was banned. Unlike eagles, they are 
colonial nesters, always far more numerous overall. And apparently they 
lack the charisma of eagles, and because they prefer live fish to dead 
ones are reviled by fishermen, the most numerous clients of our 
government wildlife managers, who have gone so far as to secure a legal 
exception to the protections of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in order 
to pursue a project, with no determinable end in sight, to shoot 
thousands off their nests because they are simply doing what they have 
always done.  We have come a long way in our understanding of birds, but 
it seems we still have just as long a way to go.
Bill Whan
Columbus
	

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