Bald eagle nesting pairs in the US

Between 2009 and 2021, American parents took to the Norse trickster name Loki with rising enthusiasm, and American bald eagles quietly rebuilt their nesting population from the brink, and the two curves have risen together (r = 0.959) in what is either coincidence or an unusually specific blessing. The national bird and the national villain, both multiplying. It is a strange kind of patriotism, which is perhaps the only kind available.

Bald eagle nesting pairs in the continental US grew from around 9,000 in 2009 to over 70,000 breeding pairs by 2021, thanks to the 1972 DDT ban finally compounding into a full recovery and the 2007 removal from the Endangered Species List; babies named Loki rose from a handful per year to 187 in 2022, thanks to Thor (2011), The Avengers (2012), and the 2021 Disney+ series. Both are, charmingly, stories about characters who were absent from American life for a generation and then came back, with slightly more complicated moral status than before.

The eagle nests. The infant named after a shape-shifter cries. Both are, in their ways, recoveries.