Dollywood – and the musical icon at the helm of it – fully embraced the opportunity to showcase, house and rehabilitate the birds.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think it ever would have happened if she had not been for it,” says Rogers, who’s repeatedly shared the stage with Parton over the years. “I think she thought it was a beautiful idea, because it was something that was just like Americana.<\/p>\n
“Just like we say, the eagle is not a Republican or Democrat.”<\/p>\n
When the Eagle Mountain Sanctuary at Dollywood opened in 1991, the species was still endangered, and the facility soon began breeding and hatching. They’d bring eggs from nests in Alaska, Rogers says, and feed the hatched birds with eagle puppets to ready them for the wild before their eventual release.<\/p>\n
The releases, 185 of them since the sanctuary opened, were “tearful, joyful type things,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I’m very proud of that,” he says. “Those were birds that would never have been out there \u2026 then they breed, those wild ones; they’ll meet other eagles.”<\/p>\n
Rogers witnessed some of Dolly’s first interactions with the birds, when she was “amazed” – and “kept her vision fixed on the eagles”.<\/p>\n
The same year the sanctuary debuted, she penned Eagle When She Flies, which also became the title of her 31st album.<\/p>\n
At the time, with the eagle populations were so depleted, such releases truly made a difference, says Michael Patrick Ward, professor of wildlife biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The bald eagle was taken off the endangered species list in 2007.<\/p>\n
“Bald eagles live a long time \u2026 decades,” he says. “For a bald eagle that might live and reproduce another 15, 20 years, it does make a big difference.”<\/p>\n
Conservationists’ efforts to save bald eagles, he says, is “a big success story that we probably don’t do a good job of highlighting”.<\/p>\n
He credits a combination of cleaning up the environment and waterways over decades of dedication.<\/p>\n
“It takes time for things like the Clean Water Act and laws to reduce the use of certain pesticides to have a population level effect,” he says. “But we’re seeing that now, and people notice that \u2026it’s good that people are noticing that these birds are returning to the landscape.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dollywood – and the musical icon at the helm of it – fully embraced the opportunity to showcase,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-574033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}