Guest post: Do a good turn daily
Guest post by Eliana Bookbinder.
At around 6 pm on Sunday June 26th, I was told that a hawk was down along the Moore Trail between Camp Marriott and Camp PMI, two of the camps on the Goshen Scout Reservation. I was off duty, but as head of the Marriott Ecology Area, I went to check on it and saw that it was not a hawk, but rather a juvenile bald eagle, hopping around on the ground covered in flies. The adult eagles were nowhere to be seen.
After about twenty minutes of texting and calls, Matt Anderson, the Director of Camp Marriott, told me just to leave the eagle there and that doing so was not a violation the Scout law (even the helpful, kind, and reverent bits, and the outdoor code to be conservation-minded), and I was not allowed to call a wildlife rehabilitation center or transport it to a wildlife veterinarian. Apparently this was because Mike Jolly, the camp superintendent, wanted to wait until a game warden could be called the next morning. Sadly game wardens don’t work on weekends (although I did try calling them, just in case). I knew that if I left the eagle out overnight that it would at best die of exposure and at worst get eaten alive by raccoons.
I checked the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website, which recommends in this situation calling a wildlife rehabilitation center. So I disobeyed Matt and called the Wildlife Center of Virginia. The on-call veterinarian told me if I could capture the eagle safely to bring it there as soon as possible. Using towels my brother and I picked up the eagle, put it in a large Tupperware container, and started driving to the Wildlife Center. We knew we were disobeying but neither of us could leave this animal out to die.
About half way to the Wildlife Center, Matt Anderson called me and asked if I’d done it. I said yes, and he told me he might have to fire me, and I said it was worth it.
Once we got to the Wildlife Center a vet took the eagle and started assessing it. Sadly it had to be put down because it had multiple broken bones in its wing.
When we returned to camp Matt called us into his office, along with the assistant camp director. They repeatedly asked us whether we really wanted to work here, which was odd because this is my seventh summer and people don’t usually come back for that many years with a possible herniated disk if they don’t want to work here. Up until today I considered the Camp Marriott staff to be my family and the Goshen Scout Reservation to be my home. Matt also said that if we had been caught we would have endangered the reputation of the BSA and possibly gotten them fined. (Not true.)
This morning after they had us work for several hours, we met with Matt, Phil Barbash (the Goshen Scout Reservation Director), and Mike Jolly. After saying we broke federal law (which we almost certainly did not) Matt fired us for disobeying his orders. While we gathered our stuff Matt told Jeremy that “we are here to cater to the scouts’ needs, not the wildlife.” This also made no sense as we had done this on our own time.
The Boy Scouts of America has a law, an oath, a motto, a slogan, and an outdoor code. In that order, they are:
A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
Be prepared.
Do a good turn daily.
As an American, I will do my best to –
- Be clean in my outdoor manners
- Be careful with fire
- Be considerate in the outdoors, and
- Be conservation minded.
Not taking this injured bird to an appropriate medical facility would have violated many parts of these statements. Nor could I disobey my own ethical and moral guidelines and allow a bald eagle, the symbol of our country and the highest rank in Boy Scouts, to die of shock or be eaten alive by predators.
What a great lesson for the scouts. Let wildlife suffer.
It is against the law to shoot a bald eagle; I’m sure saving one probably is not, but IANAL. This violates every ethic I learned as a Girl Scout; maybe Boy Scouts aren’t learning the same good behavior any more?
IANAL either but she followed instructions:
She did what the experts told her she should do.
There are wildlife situations where it is against the law to move animals, like for instance seal pups on beaches who can look abandoned to the uninstructed but in fact (most of the time) are simply stashed their while their mothers are fishing. This was not that.
I sound as if I’m arguing, I’m not arguing, just venting my irritation with the staff at Camp Marriott.
Well – lookie here what’s in the WaPo from March – I am assuming 2016, though that isn’t immediately clear:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/injured-bald-eagle-rescued-in-montgomery-county-officer-names-it-trust/2016/03/04/8a9651d8-e1fa-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html
Maybe that will help somehow.
JC
I wonder if Eliana’s erstwhile bosses were thinking of the recent incident where the Yellowstone tourists took a baby bison to a veterinarian. The calf later had to be put down, and the tourists were cited.
This was a different situation, though, since the Bookbinders checked with US Fish and Wildlife, and contacted a wildlife rehabilitation center on their recommendation.
You’ve brought honor to the Scouts! I am Eagle Scout and it makes me proud to see a Scout know the right to do and then do it. Thank you Eliana!
This seems like it had everything to do with the ego of an administration who did not like being ‘disobeyed’ and had little to do with what was legal, best for the wildlife, best for the boyscouts, or the best thing to do as a caring human being and good stewart of environment. If the camp really wanted to teach the boy scouts something it would hire the Bookbinders back to talk the difficult choices people really face in life which sometimes involves a conflict between doing what is ethical and right, and doing what you’re told. That’d be teaching leadership, but sadly the leaders have been fired and the petty bureaucrats are left in place to teach the next generation.
Sieren@7:
EXACTLY THIS.
It clearly wasn’t against the law, since she followed the procedures given on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website.
The original founder of the Boy Scouts is turning over in his grave. One of his purposes in creating the Scouts was to encourage initiative and leadership. This kind of bureaucratic repression couldn’t be more un-Scout like. And there is no doubt what the right thing to do is — consult with the experts, not a non-expert who, during work hours, you report to.
@7 – spot on!
Here we are told to call DoC (Department of Conservation) and follow their advice (which may be leave the animal alone, take to a vet or some specific action until specialist help arrives. In general tampering with flora and fauna in National Parks (including plants, dead animals, or even things like bones or native snail shells), or protected species anywhere is against the law. However, not if you are following advice/instruction from DoC.
I can’t say for the US, but here they would be regarded as having behaved as a model citizen. Their boss on the other hand may well have broken our employment law, which is somewhat more employee friendly.
Wild! I’m proud of the Bookbinders for doing their duty to God, country, and nature. I wouldn’t reprimand the camp staff for firing them, but I’d certainly reverse it. It’s a complex situation but based on expert counsel the Bookbinders did what was best.
This seems like inexplicably imperious management to me.
Surely “considerate in the outdoors” means caring about individual animals, protecting them from harm or suffering, with the advice of experts who know how to do that in practice.
And surely being “conservation minded” means protecting animals and their habitats.
And, not that there was any impact on the job in this case, surely one way to serve the scouts is to be a living example of these important virtues. I think the kids would absorb an important lesson if one of their events started late because the staff had to go take care of an injured eagle.
While as a policy matter you probably don’t want staff approaching dangerous wounded animals (suppose it was a bear?) without appropriate supervision, this could hardly count as a unwarranted safety violation.
I don’t get it. Sounds like pure petty you-didn’t-say-how-high-when-I-told-you-to-jump.
Eliana, you did the right thing. And as you are discovering, sometimes doing the right thing requires us to act upon our conscience regardless of what other people around us might think.
Eliana you and your brother did the absolute right thing. Too bad your Boy Scout camp bosses cannot see that. You should be proud of your actions in trying to save the poor bird. Do not fret about this job. Better things will come your way.
Eliana: You do yourself and your various teachers over the years proud; it’s a pity that the staff at Camp Marriott cannot say the same. Have you considered contacting someone further up the chain than the Goshen Reservation staff?I believe the next tier up is the National Capital Area Council: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Capital_Area_Council
Of course, I’m not sure I’d want to work with the asshats who burned you on this.
I am very proud of you Eliana.
The BSA has some of the best statements of ethical principles I’ve ever found. People and bureaucracies are fallible, but the principles are what led the kids to take these actions, knowing full well that they would be fired. I’m pretty sure we would all go back in a heartbeat if we could ensure that the policy at all BSA camps was that injured wildlife get transported to a rehabilitation facility as promptly as possible by camp staff, with an exception if it would produce a violation of the campers to youth ratios required by the youth protection standards.
As it is, it feels like a bit of each of our souls has been torn away – that’s how important Camp Marriott has been for us.
[…] For some reason I’ve been thinking about bad management decisions and when employees get to “disobey” management. One of the classic examples of recent times was NASA managment’s overruling of the Morton Thiokol engineers who told them that the O rings wouldn’t work in cold weather. I went looking and found a post I wrote on the subject back in January 2007. […]
Foolish consistency, we’re told, is the hobgoblin of little minds. It takes a pretty little mind to ignore FWS’s own instructions and prefer some abstract, unarticulated, camp policy. I’d want scouts to do the right thing here, and Eliana did. I hope BSA reconsiders this daft move.
[…] know the story from Eliana’s write-up. Eliana found the bird – a juvenile bald eagle – and found that it was in bad […]
“Leave No Trace”, the creed of the scout when out in the woods. Taking the sick & injured bird out of the woods left a trace on the local wildlife environment by robbing other animals of food that the death of that bird would have provided. They changed the natural order of things. They are not what scouting is about, and have rightfully been fired.
Sandy Hausman here from Virginia Public Radio. Could you kindly give me a call: 434-989-8121. Thanks.
I’ve passed on your message to Eliana.