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 ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]