Ave, Caesar—It’s Your Weekly Wag
Bravo Brawls, Jo Nesbø, Jon Hamm, the Best Dumplings in Edinburgh, and More
Dear Wags,
We came up on it on a Chesapeake sand spit. In foggy midmorning half-light, we were almost on top of the corpse before we saw what it was. Dead bird, dead bird, my sister-in-law called out in warning.
There it was, an inch from my foot, the large, feathery mound of a bald eagle, neck stretched and twisted, mauled by something, picked over by scavengers, left to rot on a lonely shore. Dead things are everywhere in rural Virginia, so much so that I sometimes think the state animal is roadkill. But a dead bald eagle is something else: a mystery to be solved, an actual federal case.
Dead bird, dead bird. Of all the broken things that litter the earth, none repulse us more. The child on rollerskates comes upon the scrawny hatchling splayed on a steaming sidewalk, swarmed by ants. Maybe it is the first dead thing we meet, and maybe that is why we hold onto dread that leaps in the throat. It is all flightless indignity, stench, and cadaver, a dinosaur’s horrid, accusatory eye.
The nature-loving family I married into, fearless about so many living wild things, has a folkloric aversion to dead birds, or “d.b.s,” as if saying the words might summon a zombie flock, an avian Betelgeuse. I have been dispatched with a trowel and a garbage bag to remove an outrage from the garden path. It is my small masculine service to be unsentimental about the creepy crawlies, to scoop up a wild invader and deposit it on the far side of the screen door. It does make me feel useful.
And yet, a dead eagle is not one of the everyday casualties of rural America. Hustling away from the remains, the pair of us were rattled. The thing with a d.b. is to get as far away as possible from a d.b. Still, avoidance can only take you so far down a narrow beach before you have to double back to your parked car. We gave death a wide berth, but death calls you back.
The upside to an encounter with the grotesque is that you leave with a yarn. We had found a dead bald eagle in a country thick with live ones. In my childhood, our national bird was on the brink of extinction in tidewater Virginia, whittled down to a handful of breeding pairs. The culprit was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. The pesticide accumulated in fish eaten by eagles and other raptors, disrupting calcium development, thinning eggshells to rice paper.
The use of DDT from the 1940s to the 1970s had catastrophic effects on bird populations. That devastation inspired Rachel Carson’s 1962 exposé, Silent Spring, the bestseller famously credited with launching the modern environmental movement. DDT was effectively eliminated from domestic agricultural use ten years after Carson sounded the alarm, an early victory for environmentalists. Numerous species, including peregrine falcons, brown pelicans, ospreys, and bald eagles, rebounded.
Now, there are around 3,000 breeding pairs of bald eagles nesting along the Chesapeake Bay, more than in any region south of Alaska. On the marshy shores of Maryland and Virginia, you may happen across a few. Eagles swoop low over salt creeks, shad flapping in their mouths. They send ospreys keening in alarm, sun themselves on rotting stumps, and steal heron eggs. They may be everywhere, but they are never common. No wild species in America commands more awe.
We defer to bald eagles out of custom and by force of law. Benjamin Franklin, their most prominent critic, called them out for “low moral character”: strutting bullies, cowards, and thieves forever mugging ospreys for their hard-won catch. Schoolchildren know Franklin pulled for the unfussy, “more respectable” wild turkey as our national bird, hokum dusted off every year around Thanksgiving.
Turkeys, like eagles, have returned in numbers to their old haunts along the Atlantic littoral. In dun homeliness and simple gifts, they encapsulate the rustic Americanness Franklin wanted so badly to publicize: a New World free of European pretension, untethered from aristocracy, outsized in plebeian qualities. The wild turkey advertises a new republic as a humble brag.
But this is only one aspect of the American character, and rarely the dominant one. The bald eagle is a flashy predator, a preening con artist, a celebrity with a chiseled profile and a puffed-up chest. It strikes a regal pose while raiding garbage dumps. An eagle talks a good game, but can be chased away by a testy red-winged blackbird a tenth its size. Franklin knew a primping fraud when he saw one, but after 250 tumultuous years, it’s pretty clear Americans love a phony.
Eagles are the spokescreatures of American dominance, emblazoned on military patches, painted on bombers, flexed across burly torsos. When the U.S. men’s hockey team defeated Canada at the 2026 Olympics, the White House posted a meme of an eagle mauling a Canada goose. Canada’s national bird is in fact the loon, and in one of the more revealing real-world encounters between the two, a bald eagle that tried to raid a loon’s nest in Maine was pierced through the heart by the defending bird’s beak. The bald eagle soars above lesser creatures, powered by its publicity.
Being America’s mascot has its privileges. Since 1940, the U.S. government has enforced the eagle’s sacred status. It is illegal not only to harass, hunt, or disturb the bird—playing loud music near an active nesting site can qualify—but to move or interfere with its nest; or to “take, possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, export, or import” any eagle, or any part of one, including feathers, eggs, or remains.
These protections, extended to golden eagles in 1962 and reinforced by overlapping federal laws, have woven an intricate regulatory armor around a quixotic species. Though bald eagles are no longer listed as endangered, killing one can still bring a $250,000 fine and a two-year prison term. Any human meddling with the bird generates an aerie of paperwork.
Our beach sighting, then, was not just an anecdote, but an incident. “You have to report it,” my wife said, something that hadn’t occurred to me, no more than I’d consider drawing a chalk outline around the remains of a cormorant. But of course this had to be so. She knew this because last year a friend had found herself in reluctant possession of a Lakota eagle-feather headdress, an object collected by her late father, a character who played fast and loose with the law.
This magnificent heirloom turned out to be the definition of hot property; it could not be kept, sold, or donated without migraines and the risk of prosecution. Somewhere in a bureaucratic labyrinth, my wife’s friend located a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent responsible for eagle feathers and other contraband derived from rare and protected species. In her city there is a warehouse full of elephant ivory canes, rhino horn virility tinctures, tortoiseshell clutches, and eagle feather crowns, all seized at the port of entry, awaiting state incineration.
I called the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources and left a message. To my surprise, they called me back and referred me to the local federal special agent investigating the illegal taking of federally protected species. Taking, in eagle management terms, is what it sounds like: the poaching, trapping, capture, or persecution of the national bird.
There is no single national database tallying crimes against bald eagles. Yet their growing numbers have led to more investigations. In the Southeast alone, nearly 250 eagle carcasses were submitted for diagnostic evaluation between 2014 and 2018, roughly 50 a year. These unfortunate birds ran afoul of civilization in all the usual ways: shot, poisoned, electrocuted by power lines, and struck by wind turbines.
Most often, they were victims of cumulative lead poisoning, having eaten contaminated prey. Eagles are not especially choosy scavengers, and they often ingest fragments of bullets and shot with the carrion they find. Experts say nearly half of America’s bald and golden eagles have chronic lead poisoning. At high levels, the toxin can cause neurological damage, muscle failure, and starvation.
The genial officer who returned my call was a veteran of such investigations (Fish and Wildlife officers are not authorized to speak to reporters without official clearance, so I’ve withheld his name). There is a protocol in such cases, and it starts with leaving the scene exactly as it is. “We don’t have the manpower to investigate every death, now that they’re so common,” he told me. “But we want to get the remains removed so they don’t upset the public.”
He kept returning to this point—the imperative to banish a dead eagle from view. I explained the remote location: a wildlife refuge in a rural area where the Potomac meets the bay, two hours from any major population center. Maybe some local game warden had already collected the evidence (only authorized officials with permits can handle a dead bald eagle). Maybe the corpse had been devoured or washed away. It felt faintly foolish to run through the logistics, trying to pinpoint exactly where I’d stumbled on the bird.
The agent was patient and thanked me for my public-spiritedness. He’d run the details down; the eagle, or what was left of it, would be tracked, scooped up, and, if not examined, entered into some log. Its feathers, talons, heart, and gall bladder would not fall into the wrong hands. I would later learn that the Fish and Wildlife Service operates a National Eagle Repository, or N.E.R., in Commerce City, Colorado, which processes, stores, and distributes eagle carcasses and feathers to Native American tribes for religious and cultural use. The facility processes around 2,000 dead eagles each year, drawn from across the country.
It was curious, this preciousness about eagles. Americans roar past a grim menagerie every day on their highways—pulverized skunks, possums, countless white-tailed deer—without a second thought, but the sight of a single fallen eagle is apparently too much to bear. Dead bird, dead bird, a grim symbol, a terrible prophecy.
It’s a human compulsion to pin symbolism on what takes wing. Death, for bald eagles and people alike, is mostly a grueling, prosaic business. An eagle may live as long as 40 years in the wild, but it will be lucky to dodge lethal hazards and survive past the age of five. The bird on the beach was not a symbol or an omen, a crime scene or a relic. It was just another splendid creature, humbled and returned to the elements. All the laws, rituals, and stories we supply ourselves.
Yours Ever,
Dirty Old Town
Ladies of London: The New Reign (Bravo). Reality television is on its way out. Is this such a bad thing, given that it cratered civilization? Meantime, Andy Cohen serves up these “ladies” to appall us. These broads ain’t ladies. They’re all styled as if they were in the cast of All About Eve. As Bette Midler put it, when it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London. Apparently, Bravo has taken this literally. Its latest crop of faux-socialites has the marcelled hair and painted-on eyebrows of bygone Ziegfeld chorines.
In the case of Martha Sitwell, a recovering party girl with a ledger of hard-luck stories, the effect is appealing. By midseason, we’ve decided that goodhearted Martha, who has left the pages of Tatler for a shabby flat with a pet magpie named Hecate, is a star. In the right light, she looks like Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle.
Martha (sadly no relation to the literary Sitwells, Edith and Osbert) sees decency in lousy people—namely, the vengeful, rubber-faced Kimi Murdoch, a “Haitian-American shipping heiress” who becomes viperous when she drinks, and on Ladies of London, it’s always five o’clock somewhere. Kimi, who has one of those transatlantic accents you can’t unhear, lunges for the role of reality villain, locking horns with Margo Stilley, an American actress who tells us she was, a million years ago, in “the most scandalous British movie ever made,” which is also a movie you’ve never heard of. Smiling tightly through these shenanigans is another Yank, Myka Meier, the “Marie Kondo of etiquette,” suggesting she picked up the wrong fork when it comes to television opportunities. Lady Emma Thynne, the aptly reedlike Marchioness of Bath, is on hand to hype the family safari park. Lottie Kane, who has put “It Girl” in her Bravo bio, roots around on the margins for a storyline, and Missè Beqiri is a Swedish Albanian model with a tragic past she’ll gladly tell you about. And (most definitely) lastly, there’s Mark-Francis Vandelli, our only male lady, lugging bitchy remarks and a tragic cackle into the first-class compartment.
It’s impossible to root for these harridans, but Bravo knows you’ll show up for a lavishly overdone face-plant. As for London, this might as well be Costa Mesa or Paramus. Globalization has turned the world into a garish playground for backstabbing climbers with plumped-up lips. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz may yet deflate the whole carnival. Consider this a farewell postcard from a gloriously vulgar era.
—Cordelia Flyte
