Brooklyn Bird Watch: June 20

With June 20 being National Bald Eagle Day, Brooklyn Bird Watch thought it might be appropriate, especially for a newspaper named after the great bird, to commemorate the Bald Eagle.

Although the Bald Eagle is surely one of the most loved, majestic, and powerful raptors on the planet, along with its special status as the United States of America’s national bird, there are smaller raptors that are faster, and probably even more feared, such as the Peregrine Falcon and the Red-Tailed Hawk. One reason for the distinction and regardless of its reputation like the Osprey for being an excellent catcher of fish, the Bald Eagle is also considered almost as much a scavenger as it is a bird of prey, whereas the Falcons and the Hawks, for example, almost exclusively are programmed to hunt down and kill all of their food.

Although, as far as we know, a Bald Eagle has never been spotted in Brooklyn Bridge Park, a juvenile Bald Eagle was spotted flying over the Brooklyn Bridge back in 2012, and the event was reported (with photos) by the New York Post.

A Bald Eagle sighting in a cityscape like New York does happen, but not that often. The people who spotted the eagle noticed it did not have the typical crown of white feathers, so the photos taken were sent to the Cornell Ornithology Lab where it was confirmed that it was a juvenile Bald Eagle, probably visiting.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “eBird” site, although there have been 1.7 thousand sightings of this majestic bird reported in Brooklyn since the beginning of the year, it is in reality rare when the great bird makes the borough of Brooklyn it’s home.

In fact, it is so rare that…