Like Ozymandias* the haughty eagle chooses his perch high above the meager trees that hold the nests of the osprey. Bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) carries with him so much symbolism. And they are often, like the one of Figure 1, so difficult to photograph. I was just beneath its tree, but really it was so far away and challenged my lens’ ability to capture him. “Capture” is the right word. The eagle is so hard to “capture” both physically and figuratively. Had we chosen the osprey instead as the emblem of America, might we have become a nation of pescatarians?

While Benjamin Franklin did not, as often cited, suggest that the turkey be the proper national bird. Perhaps it seems more appropriate in these troubled times, when we cannot find it in ourselves to come to aid of our allies. Franklin did comment in a letter to his daughter that the eagle in the national seal resembled a turkey. Franklin did apparently comment that “Bald Eagle…is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly…[he] is too lazy to fish for himself.” Like, I guess, the noble osprey. Neither agreeing or disagreeing with Franklin and having a strong disdain for the anthropomorphic, I just put it out there as a measure of a time when America was purer.

I took the image on a road side on Sanibel Island. TC and I pulled over and took photographs. The bird in question was himself haughty and disdainful. He barely looked at me and allowed me only so much time to take his image and, certainly not, to capture him before flying off.

*My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelly, Ozymandias