Jean, click on the Creative Commons license in the sidebar: you’re welcome to use my poem however you want as long as I’m given credit and you don’t include it in a conventionally copyrighted work.

I didn’t mean to imply that the eagle can feel or hear anything from the electronic workings of the transmitter — I don’t think she can — but simply that she is made conscious of her own pulse and her physical continuity in a new way. I guess you got all that. It’s always tricky to know how much to trust one’s audience to figure out; I’m really pleased that you and the other commenters got what I was trying to do here. Not that it’s a difficult poem, but it is one where every word packs a lot of freight.

Oh, and i like the heart monitor analogy.

Dick – Very glad you think so. Cheers.

O.k. I tend to write too much in comments Perhaps I ride the snake of long winded. (grin)

I felt like I was that eagle; your words are so well-chosen!

You’ll have to take my word for it, but I can assure you that the scientists involved in this project are deeply sensitive people who treat their research subjects with gentleness and respect. Todd Katzner is even a budding nature writer, I believe — and lord knows we need more scientists who are also naturalists, as Reed Noss says in the post Sally mentions. The methods are intrusive, but the results of the research may well help save the eastern golden eagle from extinction — that’s how severe the threat from industrial wind “farms” on all their major migration corridors could be. With the National Aviary and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History behind it, and funding from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the findings from this study will be very difficult for policy-makers to ignore. The tough part will be getting the eastern golden eagle recognized as a subspecies and protected by the Endangered Species Act.