Like Children in a Game

<p class="articletext">They are taught to exercise every day. Their parents show them how to jump up and down on the ample platform of the eyrie, flapping their wings. They do this by the hour, squealing and stamping the while, like children in a game. These are baby eagles. All this is preparatory to flying, and to fly as an eagle flies is something that, it seems, is learned only by weeks of practice. At last the young eagles make a first terrified flutter beyond the edge of t h e nest. Usually they tumble back again as fast as they can, scared but apparently proud and excited. If they are too slow about trying again, the parents discipline them by withholding food. Shriek with hunger as they may, the youngsters are not fed, but tantalizing morsels are dangled just beyond their grasp. When at last an eaglet completes his first solo flight, he gets a reward of food. Like girls and boys approaching maturity, young eagles, once they can fly, spend less and less time around home, until, toward the end of their first year, they go off to seek their own fortunes in the world. <br />
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They do not mate until, in the fourth or fifth season, they begin to wear the snowy crest and white tail of the adult, hut long before that they are on their own as masters of all they survey. Their tremendous wing spread of seven or eight feet is matched by the internal strength of their great pinions. The longest primary feathers are twenty inches long. The wing tips are slotted, that is, the eagle can spread the primary feathers apart like fingers. This slotted wing tip is a feature of all birds that can soar, glide and even rise without flapping the wings. It seems to act as an anti-stalling device, much like the slotted wing of the airplane invented by Handlev Page. He found that a slotted wing increased the maximum lifting power by 250 percent at an angle of forty-two degrees. Ages before, the eagle knew how to bend his wing upward and forward at the tip, with the result that the air is deflected over the wing top, leaving the main shank of the wing free to function several degrees beyond the stalling angle. With such equipment the eagle is the absolute master of flight. <br />
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Airmen have found him flying at 9750 feet above the earth. His marvelous eyes have been known to detect a fish three miles from the spot where he was soaring and capture it in one long slanting dive. It is this power that makes him the dread of the fish hawk or osprey, whom the king of the air frequently forces to drop his fish, the eagle recovering it with marvelous dexterity as it falls. His fishing skill has also earned him the hatred of fishermen who will not share their luck.</p>

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