A message from Lucy, our national bird.

[HassleCat]

Hi, everyone. Lucy the Eagle here. On behalf of myself and my husband Ricky, happy inauguration. I am a little troubled by some of what I saw on TV today, so I thought I should make a couple comments. Yes, I watch TV. Eagles have pretty good vision, and we can see into several houses from our favorite perching spot.

A while back, I saw one of my fellow eagles take a little nip at your new president, and I wanted to give a shout-out to my boy and say, "Way to be on guard." From what I have seen of the orange haired guy, we would all do well to maintain a watchful attitude. There are several things that bother me, but what bugs me the most, and Ricky agrees with me here, is all this talk about patriotism. Since people so often associate us with patriotism, and use our image to invoke feelings of patriotism, both genuine and phony, we were a touch upset by seeing how many times "patriotism" scrolled across the screen as we watched the subtitles.

It seems to us the notion of patriotism is being called up to suggest we need to tear down much of what has been done over the years. Frankly, we're pretty happy DDT residue no longer causes me to lay defective eggs, and we had two lovely children last season. True, an osprey sneaked in and grabbed one of them, but we're not blaming Obamacare for that. Ospreys happen, you know? But I digress.

Watching this big event, even though not that well attended, we got the impression the humans are being called to do some things in our name with which we might not agree. I already mentioned pesticides, but we also enjoy flying in clean skies, fishing in clean water, being protected from mentally deficient rednecks with guns, not losing all our habitat, and watching all the nice people who stop by every day to take photos of us. It's our feeling that you're a pretty good group, and we would hate to see you foul your own nest, so to speak. The new president spoke as if there is some kind of civil war going on in your country. Well, it's our country, too, of course, especially since we were here before you set up a national government, but you're responsible for running things. Please don't do anything to yourselves that will mess up all our lives, yours and ours. We like this place, and the last 30 or 40 years have been good for us. We get jumpy when we hear this rather pleasant existence described as something akin to Armageddon, and shouts of "Throw her in prison!" are not good for our nerves.

So just be careful, OK? Keep an eye on this new guy. From what we've seen, he can't be trusted around eagles, and we hear he gets grabby with female humans, too.

Thanks for listening.

Your friend, Lucy.