And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

...that reading about the nesting and hatching with the eagle family at the Decorah hatchery site had me anthropomorphizing about how the late Red Skelton might have done one of his Gertrude and Heathcliff routines. They were seagulls as I recall, but could just as well have been eagles, I suppose.
Red might have started with Mom and Dad returning to the nest site, which had been blown down by a storm last year:

G. - I suppose it will be a mess. I don’t know if it is worth starting over again. We did not have insurance.
H. - Look! There is a nest of some sort where our old place used to be. And gosh! Its foundation is made of six by six beams. All our kids and friends and their kids could not have moved anything that heavy up there. What’s the deal?
G. - Well, it isn’t a finished nest, but they left a pile of sticks and some hay around, like they expected us to finish it.
H. - Maybe it was that spin-off of Habitat for Humanity, Aviaries for Avians, that did the preliminary work.
G. - It has been a good place to raise a family. How many eggs have we hatched out for them over the years? Must be two dozen or more. And the state guys make sure there is an ample supply of trout. Plus there are some other small, furry creatures available from time to time to provide a change of menu.
H. - Do you suppose they are doing it just so they can become famous for the televised coverage? I think I heard they have cameras covering another nest just up the Upper Iowa River nearby.
G. - I think they just want our numbers to increase.
H. - And that sort of worries me. What if they decide there are so many of us that a few can be spared? I keep thinking about what they did with the mourning doves. As soon as there were a lot of them around, they declared an open hunting season to keep the numbers down.
G. - According to this morning’s paper, they may not even have to do that. Lots of our kin are dying from lead poisoning after eating birds and deer killed by lead shot or lead slugs.
H. - The state could not do that because we are the national symbol. Congress and the president would stop that.
G. - I don’t know about the president. He does not seem to care as much about the American eagle as he does “doves of peace.”
H. - And what has that gotten him? He just gives them free food and a free nesting place, and he gets nothing in return.
G. - Stop with the politics, Heathcliff. It’s tough enough to raise a family as it is.

And Red would end with his usual “God bless!”