I was reminiscing about life lesson I learned from watching eagles last year. I started watching the eagle cam when the eaglets hatched. I’ve read about eagle characteristics and their practices. I was a little horrified at first of the brutality that goes along with being an eagle.
The adult eagles do not intervene if a sibling decides to kill another sibling. If there is not enough food then someone goes hungry because they do not split the food in equal shares so all babies get fed. Truly when you are an eagle the fit survive and the weak die.
I stopped watching for a while because I did not want to witness the youngest eaglet die by starvation or be killed by its sibling. The last time I watched the two older siblings brutally peaked at the younger one and the mother did not even attempt to give it food. It only got food by grabbing it from another.
Even though I stopped watching for a while I did continue to think about the eagles and to read about them. You have to be tough if you are an eagle. If a young eaglet refuses to fly then the mother takes it upon her back and drops it a number of times to encourage it to fly and rescues it before it hits the ground. She takes it out and repeats the same process until the final flight. I’ve read the mother eagle will give a heart wrenching scream and drop her baby. If the eaglet does not take flight then it hits the ground and dies.
I tuned back in one week just to see how the eagles were doing. To my surprise the youngest eagle was the scrappiest. While the two older eaglets were content to be fed the youngest one already knew how to tear off meat and fed itself.
Still at the bottom of the peaking order it did not make him weak by any means. He was very ferocious at times and gave back any punishment he was given. I began thinking about how cruelty now turned into an advantage. It is a great lesson to ponder for humans.
We can let our circumstances over come us or we can over come our situations and be stronger because of it. It is also a good lesson on raising human children to lean on their own strengths instead of having everything handed to them. It is human nature to give our children and easy road because we love them. True love though is letting them face some hard times on their own and letting them survive them.
about gracehodgin
Grandma Blogger encouraging grand parents to remain active in the lives of their grand children and to inspire imagination and creativity.
When Grace is not writing articles for her blog then she morphs into GracieLoo and is off to ZombieZoo where she is the resident Grandma who hands out cookies, kisses, band-aids for booboos and reads stories to her beloved ZombieZoo Residents.
Lovely post. I often look at my now 20 year old son and know I helped him too much. You are so right – we can learn at lot watching the eagles. Thanks for sharing!
Wow! It is amazing how life can just hurt so bad when you are young. Most of the time it is okay in the end because, just like the eagals you learn from it and become stronger. This made me tear up, reading of the baby eagle. I’m thrilled it made it to a point to fend for it’s self. Thank you for sharing.
Very Graphic and very true. It’s hard to do, but very needed.
Great post and I have to agree with Audrey. I know I have “helped” both of my kids too much. They will come back and “ask questions” before they go out and “do it themselves”. They seem like they “know” a lot of things – and they do – but mom is also the sounding board and “teacher” of all things before they take many of their steps.
Now sometimes I wonder if that was helping them too much or allowing them to do their own thing knowing that there will be family there to help if they fall.
What a great analogy. In the long run we don’t do our kids a favor by protecting them from consequences that living in the world will eventually deliver.
I just learned a lot about eagles!
When I read the title of this post I though it was going to be life lessons from The Eagles band through their songs. Oh well. Great post anyway.
Words of wisdom that we all know are priceless! I have had to make some tough choices with 2 of our children when they were teens, now as they are adults they appreciate the choices we made and it has made them into the wonderful adults they are now.
Grace, you have such great insight into growing strong independent children. We all know that we appreciate all the more the things that we worked the hardest for.
I guess I was one of those that the mother had to take out and drop…life is such an amazing adventure!
I commented once but I came back to reiterate the wisdom presented here!
The “Forge of Adversity” is cruel and tough…but necessary.