Bald Eagle Egg Hatches After Rescued From Orioles’ Florida Spring Training Camp

The bald eaglet at just minutes old. Photo courtesy of the American Eagle Foundation.

One eaglet has survived and hatched at the American Eagle Foundation’s Tennessee center after being rescued from the Boston Orioles’ spring training ground in Florida.

The hatched egg was one of two taken from the Ed Smith Stadium. The second egg never hatched - despite being given extra time in the incubator.

The players are scheduled to arrive at the stadium early next month. Fears were that flying balls, people, and commuter traffic would endanger both the nesting parents and the newly hatched eaglets.

The bald eagle nesting pair had built their nest on top of a 135-foot lighting pole located in the right outfield of the stadium. After removing the eggs, all of the lighting poles in the stadium were modified with tarps to discourage any new nest from being built on them.

The newly hatched eaglet is being fed by an eagle puppet to prevent human-imprinting. The conservation group plans to release the eaglet into the wild sometime in mid-March, when it will be about 13-weeks old. The eaglet will be placed in an artificial nesting tower located at Douglas Lake in Tennessee.

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Nations Seek to Increase Whale Hunting by Expanding Loopholes in International Ban

Stock photo.

Whaling as a way of life and industry can be traced back to prehistoric times through archeological evidence such as harpoons dating back to 6000 BC, petroglyphs (rock engravings) depicting whale hunts, and whale bones in ancient settlements.

Historically, whales were hunted for uses including: meat, bones for corsets, wax for candles, and oils for industrial lubricants and fuel for lamps and lanterns.

“By the 1920s, whale oil fed increasing demand for animal feed, machine lubricants, glycerin-based explosives, soap, detergents, and margarine; spermaceti from the sperm whale became a staple in cosmetics, and later, even as a lubricant for the (NASA) aerospace programme,” according to Reinventing the Whale, a report published in May 2010 by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society in the United Kingdom.

Right whale. Graphic courtesy of BBC News.

Reaching up to present times, this excessive international hunting has brought many species to the brink of extinction, such as the right whales, gray whales, and blue whales, just to name a few.

What’s being threatened now is the worldwide commercial whaling moratorium (ban) that was put into effect in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission. Countries are allowed quotas - which can change yearly - on catching and killing whales for scientific research purposes. After the research data is obtained from the animals, their meat and other useful parts can be sold to market.

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