Found an Eagle

Remember that song, "Found A Peanut"?

We were at the tail end of a winter solstice walk

tinged with snow on the ground and lots of cold air - Noah, Ken and Sarah came across an eagle on the ground at Walker Creek. It was frozen, perfect condition. Just the tiniest pin-prick blood spots on its white tail feathers.

What do you do with a dead eagle? Aside from keep your dog away - you are to call the National Eagle Repository.

Before we knew this, Noah was so excited about the eagle's talons: keeping them, tallying how many they were and who of his friends and family would be given one of these incredible power-packed claws. We didn't know what the National Eagle Repository was, or what it did. But Noah was feeling a bit deflated about this foiled eagle talon plans.

Sarah called to report the eagle - and passed on to Noah what she found out. If the bird is in good condition, like ours was, feathers and talons and sometimes the head are given to tribes for use in their ceremonies.

Noah's first words, when he heard the news about how the eagle parts would be used was, "Oh! That makes me feel so much better!" His reaction makes me think - we've taught him well.

From the wise collective of Wiki:

The National Eagle Repository is operated and managed under the Office of Law Enforcement of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service located at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge outside of Denver, Colorado. It serves as central location for the receipt, storage, and distribution of bald and golden eagles that have been found dead. Eagles and eagle parts are available only to Native Americans enrolled in federally recognized tribes for use in religious and cultural ceremonies.

After the legal protection of the bald eagle, Native Americans had no access to feathers and other parts of the birds they need for certain religious and cultural activities. The best known use is in war bonnets and other feathered headdresses. Some continued hunting and considered it legal on reservation grounds as hunting and their cultural self-determination was guaranteed in treaties. In the early 1970s the National Eagle Repository was operated out of Pocatello, Idaho and in the 1980s distribution was out of the USFWS Forensic Lab in Ashland, Oregon. The office collected birds and distributed them further. But the process was slow and the numbers of birds low.

President Bill Clinton signed an executive memorandum on April 29, 1994, after meeting with 300 tribal leaders at the White House. He reformed the National Eagle Repository and obliged all federal agencies to send dead eagles to the repository.^[4] Following this memorandum, in 1995 the repository moved to the Denver area and got its own offices at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.