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Comment by willturman | Hacker News Reader

It’s unbelievably lazy to trivialize biodiversity loss given the fact that we’re in the midst of the Anthropocene Extinction.

We should all be grateful to Canada for being a refuge for so many species we slaughtered with westward expansion.

You’ll find a list here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_reintroduction

Again, Eagles are a migratory species, that they subsisted by eating garbage in small town Alaska having been hunted and DDT’d to extinction in the lower 48 isn’t the feather in your cap you think it is. The point is that we killed all of the eagles in the lower 48 - a huge swath of territory.

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>... that they're thriving eating garbage in small town Alaska...

This is an "unbelievably lazy" and fundamental misunderstanding of how vast and unpopulated Alaska is. I mean you've even got someone else[1] in this thread with experience highlighting that your assertion is inaccurate.

>... and DDT'd to extinction in the lower 48...

You completely missed the part of the quote, in my comment, that very clearly states they were never extinct, and were upgraded from "endangered" to "threatened", and then removed from the list entirely in 2007.

>The point is that we killed all of the eagles in the lower 48 - a huge swath of territory.

It was never true that we killed all of them in the lower 48. Please go read the previously linked Wiki article.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43180488

We don't fully know (and probably never will) how many genetic diversity has been lost in USA population, subspecies, etc.

I know you won't but It feels you are about to thank us humans to make bald eagle population lower so their diseases didn't spread. Living in Europe this flow of thoughs it's been heard so much.

>We don't fully know (and probably never will) how many genetic diversity has been lost in USA population, subspecies, etc.

I completely agree with this statement.

>I know you won't but It feels you are about to thank us humans to make bald eagle population lower so their diseases didn't spread.

What does this even mean? I simply want an accurate picture of things. Someone made a statement, someone else attacked them for it and insisted they were wrong, yet in point of fact, the initial statement was accurate. More falsehoods were then spread, and I corrected those, too.

That's 'bout it. To imply that I feel some certain way about bald eagles or species loss because I just asked for an accurate understanding around what actually happened is a bit of a stretch.

It’s unbelievably lazy how everyone is suddenly an expert on bald eagles.

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