16/08/2023
This beautiful bird was just one of many I captured yesterday Paradise Park stay tuned for more pictures and more posts! I can’t wait to share mine with you all. If you go to the comments and fine my comment as Nat brace then you’ll get a sneak peak of what’s to come from my trip! Words cannot explain the experience you get at paradise park! 💝
To add the image here is not my image ☺️
This is Dakota our 8-year-old North American Bald Eagle. You can see Dakota fly in our ‘Eagles of Paradise Display’ at 12noon (weather permitting) down by the Fun Farm, where he will be joined by other birds of prey like Tangee the Palm-nut Vulture and Angelo a Bateleur Eagle.
Bald Eagles can reach 30 years of age in the wild and are famous for being the national emblem of the United States of America since 1782.
The species was nearly declared extinct in the late 1970s due to a pesticide called ‘DDT’. It was shortly after World War II when DDT was hailed as a new pesticide to control mosquitoes and other insects. However, DDT and its residues washed into nearby waterways, where aquatic plants and fish absorbed it. Bald eagles, in turn, were poisoned with DDT when they ate the contaminated fish. Thanks to federal protections as well as regulations involving DDT, in 1995 the population had recovered enough for the ‘United States Fish and Wildlife Service’ to change its status from Endangered to Threatened. Then in 2007 with an estimate of at least 9,789 nesting pairs in the United States, it was removed from the list of Threatened and Endangered species under the Endangered Species Act.
In 2021, the newest estimates for the Bald Eagle population total 316,700 individuals, which included 71,467 breeding pairs. A great conservation success story. The bird continues to be protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Both laws prohibit killing, selling or otherwise harming eagles, their nests, or eggs.
Photograph by Keeper Archie