I was 34 years old before I ever saw a bald eagle in the wild.
It is our national bird, of course, and presumably it is so because bald eagles were once found all over the United States.
But depending on where we lived, those of us born in the waning years of the Baby Boom (which ended in 1964) or the early years of Generation X (which started right after the Baby Boom) rarely, if ever, saw a bald eagle in flight.
As a resident of Northern Utah now, I can pretty much go out on any given winter day and find at least one bald eagle, if not a dozen. It helps that I know to look along unfrozen bodies of water, as balds are fish-eaters. And it also helps that I live in a region to which bald eagles migrate from areas farther north.
But it helps more than Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring," a book that revealed the deadly consequences of the widespread, and often careless, use of synthetic pesticides after World War II. The most infamous of these was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane -- more commonly known as DDT.
Before she became an acclaimed environmental writer, Carson worked as a biologist for the agency we now know as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. It was Carson's remaining Washington, D.C., connections that prompted Olga Huckins, literary editor of the Boston Post, to send Carson a copy of a letter she had written to the Boston Herald newspaper.
In her letter, Huckins described how the Massachusetts government had -- against her wishes -- indiscriminately sprayed DDT over the private bird sanctuary she owned. The result was a mass killing of the birds, resulting in a "silent spring" in which no birds hatched.
Carson, unable to get anyone in government to investigate the claim, delved into the issue herself. She intended to write a magazine article, but her work quickly grew into the book, "Silent Spring." The book Carson introduced mainstream America to such terms as "ecosystem" and "biomagnification" -- which is the accumulation of a substance as it moves up the food chain from smaller organisms to larger ones.
When DDT was sprayed over land in order to kill off mosquitoes, it embedded itself into the most vital processes of the plants and organisms exposed to it. It didn't wash away with rain or wear off.
And that brings us back to bald eagles. When DDT seeped into the water it contaminated tiny zoo plankton, which were eaten by small fish. The small fish, containing a more concentrated form of DDT, were eaten by larger fish. The larger fish, contaminated by an even more concentrated form of DDT, were eaten by bald eagles.
In just a couple of decades, bald eagles became so sickened by the amounts of DDT in their bodies that their eggshells were too weak to incubate properly -- leaving bald eagles unable to reproduce.
By the time I was born in 1961, there were only 50 pairs of bald eagles left in the United States. When "Silent Spring" was published in 1962, its detailed account of the "biomagnification" of chemicals in all of the nation's "ecosystems" started a grassroots movement that eventually gave us a the Clean Water Act, Earth Day and a ban on DDT, among other environmental movements and acts.
Tragically, Carson died of breast cancer 18 months after the book was released.
But because of her, children growing up in America today do not have to wait until they are approaching middle age to see the astonishing image of a bald eagle perched in a tree along a riverbank or scooping its dinner from a lake. And such images are important to a child, as Carson so eloquently says in her 1956 book, "The Sense of Wonder."
For those who live in or near Northern Utah, be sure to check out the new film about Carson titled "A Sense of Wonder," during its free showing at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 21, at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Brigham City, UT. The refuge visitor's center is located right off Interstate 15. A live bald eagle presentation will precede the movie at 1 p.m.
To see whether "A Sense of Wonder" is coming to a theater near you on its 100-city national tour, go to www.asenseofwonderfilm.com.
Now go outside and take a look around you. Even in the tiniest sidewalk crack there are natural wonders to be found. Take some time to ponder them before they are gone.
(And the Wednesday Whatzit photo? It was snapped at the annual Snow Goose Festival in Delta, UT. More about that later this week.)