Given the hoo-ha whipped up about the possibility of reintroducing white-tailed eagles back to East Anglia I was interested in seeing the lengths to which Americans go to celebrate their national bird - the bald eagle (a close relative of the white-tailed eagle).
Around this time of year there are eagle days in Iowa, Idaho, Oklahoma and Illinois. In Utah , Connecticut and Wisconsin you have to wait until February, South Dakota goes for March, Alaska opts for November and that's where I stopped looking. But the tone of all these events is highly celebratory. These local communities are chuffed to bits that they have eagles that have made such a good population recovery and you get the impression that the more bald eagles there are, the happier people are.
And these are people who are living with eagles - they might be expected to know a thing or two about them!
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
We only think of species like this as from the remote uplands because of what we've done to them and theit habitat - read Mike Shrubb's Birds, Scythes and Combines and Roger Lovegrove's Silent Fields - and Sea Eagles naturally live around coasts and in large wetlands. There's a huge opportunity in Suffolk to think more widely about the mix of intensive farmland, more extensive farmland, heath forest and wetland - not least because the biggest question has to be whether there is enough wilder land to support these birds: White Tailed Eagles have made it on their own to the superb 5,000 ha Dutch Oostvardersplassen reserve only 100 miles across the North Sea, first as wintering birds, and now breeding. But, of course, it won't pay and landowners won't like it. Neither is true - look at the Lake District Osprey's, hugely popular with local people because of the tourism cash they bring in & the positive image of the Lakes they represent; look at Norfolk, and what Titchwell does for local business. Its not an either/or - despite the propoganda, the countryside is already a mixed economy and many farmers are making money from visitors - through B&B, or directly, like the delicious Asparagus I bought at a roadside stall the last time I was in Suffolk. And, with farm economics less than brilliant, more and more farmers are interested in working with Natural England through Higher Level Stewardship.
And the horrific cost ? £600,000 is what 1,000 hectares of arable land recieves in single farm payment from Defra in just 4 years - and you'd only get 1 medium, not large, holiday house on the Suffolk coast for that.
The Eagles will be great value for money - as much for rural communities along the Suffolk coast as for conservationists - and I hope they also get us thinking more expansively about how we use land more imaginatively.