Because they weren’t licensed for it.
I’m speechless.:eek:
“Oh, that sounded heartless and stupid? I’m sorry, what I actually meant to say was the egg wouldn’t have hatched anyway. Yeah. That’s it.”
Idiots.
:eek: Sputter
cry
:mad: :mad: :mad:
It’s actually not as big of a deal as it would have been 10 years ago:
Not that anyone advocates going around and squashing eagle eggs, but I don’t think one egg is going to fuck with the population.
FWIW, I see them at the lake all the time. They’re really cool birds.
Well, if bald eagles aren’t endangered anymore, why do you have to have a license?
To be sure, we don’t want Joe Schmo trying to breed bald eagles in his basement, but if a licensed zoo already has clearance to care for animals, what’s the big deal when the animals breed?
This case is special, because the birds were originally thought to be sterile.
Rewrite the damn law. Don’t let another agency that only has a license to exhibit them destroy the occasional egg that comes along because of that fact.
Forward thinking… meet tunnell vision.
Bureaucracy in action.
I agree. That is a silly law that should be changed.
Maybe they didn’t handle it in the ideal way, but I don’t think this is such a big deal.
Sure, it’s sad that they destroyed an egg and possibly snuffed out a future eaglet. And yeah, the law they cited does suck. It sucks that if you have two bald eagles who happen to get it on, a lack of permit prevents you from letting nature take its course. That’s perverse. I am sure it was intended to prevent untrained people (at educational centers and raptor rescue organizations) from becoming eagle breeders. It looks as though this law had some unintended consequences–in that if the eagles themselves decide to breed, it puts the facility in a difficult position.
But permit issue aside, if the facility didn’t have the resources to provide a good fledging environment, what do they do? Spend thousands of unbudgeted dollars changing their set-up? Do they spend thousands of unbudgeted dollars to transport one egg/chick to a different pair of eagles, hoping they’ll raise it?
It seems stupid to me to just destory the egg–no idea how much they explored other options. However, it sounds as though they now have a system in place for dealing with the next egg without making an omelette out of it. So that’s good.
Don’t get me wrong–I love birds. I used to work in bird rescue. I appreciate bald eagles and have been able to watch to some wonderful mid-air eagle fights over fish at my parents’ house. But they’re not endangered, and they are pretty well protected, so it’s not like the loss of this egg is a blow to the world ecosystem.
Just think of the publicity (and the money that could have poured in) if the zoo had been able to announce that two eagles formerly thought to be sterile had produced a viable egg. I’m sure a plea for help for donations to help transport the egg to another facility would have been met quickly.
The fact that the birds tried to get the egg back from the officials just breaks my heart. The officials didn’t explore other opportunities. They just got rid of the egg.
This is the laughable result of a law allowing display, plus a law preventing bald-eagle mills, plus a bunch of stupid people.
There’s a rotf/lmao comment on Fark if you can stand it; scroll for user DarthBrooks.
That is pretty funny.
My thoughts exactly. What the hell, are these people robots uncapable of creative thought, or are the so ensconsed in the “Do no more than you can” attitude that seems to effect government workers?
No one has said the egg was fertile, it doesn’t appear to have been examined to determine that.
Never put these guys in charge of an orphanage. What if they let their license expire?
Forgive me everyone ,but this is the most hilarious thread I’ve ever opened. In fact, if I knew how, I’d nominate it for threadspotting. Hello!!! I see more bald eagles every day than I see chickens. They are now a dime a dozen. I have no problem eating eggs from birds in captivity either, and I’ll bet that most of you have no problem eating captive bird eggs either.
While I agree that perhaps a better solution could have been arrived at, I also agree with the others that one egg won’t harm the population.
Point in fact, there’s a huge eagle’s nest not two hundred yards from where I’m sitting- it gets occupied every year. It’s far too high to see if any chicks get raised, but one can almost always see an adult perched on a brach nearby.
I have, when walking out into the fields next door, seen as many as a dozen young and adult Bald Eagles perched in the trees. Two or three weeks ago, I snapped an excellent photo of an eagle taking wing- I was probably a bare twenty feet from the base of the tree from which it left, which was itself about thirty feet high. That tree is in my front yard, about fifty feet from me at this moment.
I worry about my cat. 
It’s not unusual for the eagles to take small dogs, cats and other pets if they’re small enough to get ahold of.
What gets me about those same laws is the feathers. You want Eagle feathers? The woods near here are littered with 'em. Some of them are eighteen inches long. But they’re illegal to own, posess or collect (unless you’re a Native American in certain situations.)
I understand that one can’t tell a molted feather from one taken from a poached eagle, but still.
Then, to continue the analogy, they wouldn’t be allowed to have more children. You’ll notice they didn’t kill the eagles, just the egg.
Oh, time for me to break out my bald eagle stories. Run, everyone.
When my parents and I moved to a house on a lake, we saw more wild birds than we could ever have expected. One afternoon, not long after we moved in, I was upstairs reading. My parents called up to me with great excitement about the fact that there were two–TWO!!–bald eagles in the nearby tree. I was like, yeah yeah, my book is too good to stop now, I’ll come down later. They insisted that this was a ONCE IN A LIFETIME event, seeing bald eagles in their natural environment. So I came down and peered through the spotting scope and admitted they WERE pretty cool. 20 years later, I love to tease them about this “once in a lifetime” event because the goddamn eagles are always around whenever the Canada & Snow geese migrate through. Every year. They’re still kinda neat to look at, but their appearance is hardly a notable event. Plus it’s hard to feel great about them when they start trying to eat an injured goose that isn’t dead yet.
My husband and I once spent the weekend in a bed and breakfast in Maine where the owner was an utterly pedantic pain in the ASS and utterly prideful about what a vacation wonderland his fair state was. He kept telling us what to go see, what we couldn’t miss. At one point he was on our case about going to see some wonderful lighthouse. To get him off our back I reminded him that we came from a state with a number of lighthouses (not that I’ve seen any of them, but that’s because I simply don’t give two shits about lighthouses). He scoffed at this and said it isn’t the same without the smell of sea air and saltwater. What a prick. When we checked out, he started insisting that we take a detour on our way to the airport so we could see two bald eagles that nested on some ugly power line thing. I just let him ramble on and on; I didn’t bother to tell him I’d probably seen more bald eagles, more often, than he ever would. I guess it never occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, there were bald eagles in other places in the U.S.