Well, it was north of here, up near the border with Alaska. You won’t like the sound of this, but we were up there collecting bald eagle eggs. No, hold your horses, it was all to help save the species. The birds had once been common all over North America, but they were down to just a few hundred pairs. ‘Scientists had found that a pesticide called DDT was making their eggshells very thin and delicate, and so when the parents tried to brood the eggs they would break. So we were up there to try to collect some eggs for a captive breeding programme. And, if you got the eggs early in the season, the eagles would lay a second clutch, so the species wouldn’t be harmed at all. But yes, I suppose that we’d do things differently now. This was back in the days when we didn’t know as much as we do now about conservation. ‘Anyway, my dad was piloting us in a floatplane, pretty similar to the one I flew you guys here in. There was just Dad, Roger and me in the plane. We were planning to be up there for three or four days at the most.
