Bald eagle nesting pairs in the US

As bald eagles have recovered across America, reported sightings of fireball meteors have also increased, a correlation of 0.993 that either means the eagles are attracting cosmic debris or that both trends measure the same thing: more Americans looking up. The eagle glides, the fireball streaks, and the chart spans from the nest to the stratosphere with the vertical ambition of a scatter plot that has discovered the sky.

Bald eagle nesting pairs grew from about 9,800 to over 71,000 between 2005 and 2021. Fireball meteor sightings grew from about 500 to over 5,000 per year as the American Meteor Society's online reporting tools made it easy for anyone with a smartphone to submit a sighting. Both trends are upward curves, but the fireball increase is largely an observation effect—more reports because more reporting infrastructure, not necessarily more actual fireballs. The eagle recovery is a genuine population increase. One is real ecological success; the other is partly real and partly better data collection.

Nine years of eagles and fireballs is a correlation between a genuine conservation success and a data collection improvement dressed as a celestial event. The eagles are actually more numerous; the fireballs are actually better reported. Both trends go up, but for different reasons and with different levels of ontological certainty. The eagle is real. The fireball is real. The increase in fireball reports is partly a mirage. The correlation, as always, does not distinguish.