When God Isn't Green by Jay Wexler

Author:Jay Wexler [Wexler, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0193-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

EAGLES

A Reprise

It’s hard to explain what a dead bald eagle smells like. It’s not as bad as you might think, but it’s not great either. Maybe kind of like a dead fish. Not a slab of sashimi-grade tuna, of course, but also not like something that’s been decaying on the beach for a week. Probably a dead eagle smells a lot like a dead chicken. But then again, I don’t really know what a dead chicken smells like. Probably it smells something like a dead fish. One thing is for sure, though: processing a dead bald eagle sends a lot of tiny fluffy feathers up into the air. Back in Commerce City, it was practically snowing dead-eagle feathers in the room while I watched two people from Bernadette Atencio’s staff work through a few newly arrived birds. It was a little disconcerting that the two men working with the birds were wearing face masks and full-length protective suits while I stood there trying to breathe as little as possible so as not to contract any eagle-carcass-fluffy-feather-borne diseases, whatever those might be, if indeed such diseases exist (and how could they not?).

The first box of eagles was from South Carolina. Immediately, Atencio told me that these would almost certainly be bald eagles and they would probably be on the small side. The word she actually used was “dinky.” A young man named Adam, who had been working at the repository for a while before heading off to college, unpacked the box and took out what seemed to me to be a not entirely dinky bald eagle. He removed the bird from a plastic bag and examined it. The eagle was in better condition than I had expected. Its face was bloody, and it had a large wound right in its belly, but the bird was completely intact, and the feathers looked decent. Adam extended the enormous wing and combed through the feathers. Explaining that each eagle has ten primary feathers and fourteen secondary feathers, he counted them all up and checked the quality of each one. The wing was looking good, and so was the other one, but when he got to the tail, there was a problem.

“Oooh, what happened there?” Atencio asked.

The tail was missing six out of its twelve feathers and would have to go. Adam took a huge red bolt-cutter-looking thing and chopped the tail off in one crunchy click. Then he took the tail and put it in the trash can.

Meanwhile, on the eagle-processing table opposite from where Adam was set up, longtime repository specialist Dennis Wilst was hard at work on another South Carolina bird, which was notable for its extremely well-preserved head.

“This guy is amazingly fresh,” Wilst announced to the room. “He still has an eyeball—you don’t often see that.”

The eyeball might have been fresh (it didn’t look that fresh to me, but what did I know?), but the head itself was a different story. Whoever had found the eagle had probably put it in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.