Royal Raptor

THE GOLDEN EAGLE by Robert Murphy. 157 pages. Duffon. $3.95.

In the human imagination, the eagle has long been more a symbol than a bird. It was celebrated by the Egyptians as the bird of the sun, the lion of the sky. It was known to the Greeks as the emissary of Zeus, and blamed in their legends for the death of Aeschylus --an eagle, the story goes, mistook the bald head of the dramatist for a stone and dropped a turtle on it. It is most familiar to Americans as the heraldic symbol on the U.S. Seal of State. But the real-life eagle beggars all symbolic descriptions, and of all the species that survive, the most impressive is the golden eagle.

In this elegant little piece of nature literature, Author Robert Murphy (The Pond, The Peregrine Falcon) describes the life of one golden eagle from the day she leaves the nest in Colorado to the day she sinks her beak into the poisoned carcass of a ewe. Only two years intervene, but in that limited lifetime she accomplishes almost everything the species was designed to do. In describing what she does, Author Murphy, a man who can think like a scientist and write like a bird, manages to produce both a fascinating tale and a veritable encyclopedia of the eagle.

Items: a full-grown female of the species measures a full 3 ft. from top to tail, and her wings spread 7 ft. and more; the male, or tiercel, is smaller by a third. The golden eagle's foot is longer than a man's hand, and its talons are as sharp as a razor. Its eye, a miracle of natural engineering, focuses simultaneously upon every point in its field of vision. It can soar above the highest Rockies and power-dive upon its prey at more than 12,0 m.p.h. Its prey of preference are small animals and large birds, but it sometimes kills a bobcat or a coyote. In Asia it has long been trained to stoop at antelope, and in medieval Europe it was flown at wolves--but only from the wrists of kings.

In contemporary America, however, the royal raptor has about the same status as a clay pigeon. With the cynical and inaccurate excuse that it is a men ace to both man and beast, the golden eagle has been poisoned, trapped, nest-robbed, and pursued in planes by hot-shots taking potshots until the North American variant of this noble species stands in imminent danger of extinction.

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