book tv coverage, our commitment to congress. lawmakers meeting what is expected to be a brief session. no votes are expected. live now to the floor of the senate here on c-span2.

the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. the parliamentarian: washington, d.c., october 13, 2023. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable thomas r. carper, a senator from the state of delaware, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patty murray, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 3:00 p.m. on monday, october 16, 2023.

and the senate now gavelling out from the brief session. when lawmakers return you can see live coverage here on c-span2. we take you back to our book tv programming. >> the powers he had and so, you know, that's a real part of making him come alive and then later, you know, there's something called gorge, in yosemite national park. after the sierra club was established and they did high trips up there, they also hiked down through there. so, there's some wonderful accounts and i tried to extract all the information that i can from these various accounts, but focusing on muer's when i'm with muer, but all of those details help me bring scenes alive.

>> very, very effective. jack, could you tell us a bit about-- as we were trying to look at pesticides and ddt and what it was doing to the-- not only the bald eagle population, but the eggs and walk us through that discovery and how we came through that and made some realizations about young bald eagles and why we weren't seeing any. >> let me just real quickly get on the-- jump on the audubon trash wagon. [laughter] >> he never saw a bald eagle he did not want to shoot. and, but and he hated it so much that he discovered a -- another eagle he said should be the representative of our

country, but it was a false identification and really the joke is on him when he identified as a third eagle species living in north america, was actually an immature bald eagle and-- >> jack, may i interrupt that, the exact quote from audubon for the eagle as a lousy, thieving, lazy, dishonest, immoral, and craven feathered national representative. [laughter] >> yeah. so ddt-- (laughter) >> what's interesting is ddt was released to the general market in august 1945 and congress had five years earlier passed the bald eagle protection act and to--

worried that it would go the same way as the passenger pigeon and carolina parakeet both which died in the cincinnati zoo so don't go live in the cincinnati zoo. and so its relation to market in 1945 and immediately people are saying, experts are say, you've got to be careful with this, this chemical pesticide. it can have a major impact on wildlife and also on humans, but the chemical industry was so powerful, it-- the publicity folks were so good, you know, and its public relations was so active that ddt soon became available in grocery stores in many different forms for home use. it wasn't just used in agriculture, but it was. i mean, we blanketed the lower

48 with ddt during the late '40s and on into the 1950's and into then the 1960's. and there was one particular man, charles broley, a retired banker from canada who moved down to tampa with his family in the 1930's. and he's 60 years old. he had -- he needed something to do in retirement and he started climbing pine trees to ban eagleets and nobody was doing it at the time and he did this for 20 years until age 79. never fell out of a tree. climbed some 1100 trees and banded over 1200 eaglets, showing science these were migrated birds and of course,

eyewitness to the decline of the population. and the retired banker from winnipeg was the first to make a connection between the declining bald eagle population, of course, you see brown pelicans disappearing, too. he's on the gulf coast in tampa. he's seeing brown pelicans and other birds disappear, too, spring turning silent and so, he's the first person to make a connection between ddt and the diminishing bald eagle population. rachel carson talks about him in "silent spring" as a matter of fact. he didn't understand quite how it was happening. he thought that ddt was simply poisoning the bald eagles. it was getting into the food chain bald eagles-- or fishing raptors and so, we often, you know, talk about how birds are affected by ddt, but fish were, too. and the environments were just

ruined in many places by ddt. so ddt got into the fish, got into the food chain of the bald eagles and went up the food chain and bald eagles eating the fish and ddt in their body is met tablizing into dde, getting in the bloodstream on males and females and greater impact on females because the dde was responsible for them laying eggs with very fragile shells, or addled eggs, eggs that would not hatch or with the deformed chicks in the eggs. and of course, we all know the story about rachel carson, many scientists by the late '50s, even before, as i said, were making this connection between the declining wildlife

population and ddt and linking it to human health and there are still studies being done that have linked alzheimer's to ddt generations earlier. and, but anyway, thanks to-- by this time charles, and rachel carson published her book, charles had died apparently of a heart attack. like aldo trying to put out a brush fire and, but -- and in 1972, william ruckel, the first epa administrator appointed by richard nixon took a very brave move. a lot of pressure on him know the to do this and ban the sale of ddt in the united states. really opening the way up for the restoration of many bird populations such as the pelican

and the bald eagle and falcons and merlins and others. >> patrick, in your book about mark catesby, you didn't have a plethora of original sources or letters that mark left behind. you do a splendid job researching and putting context in and around that period of time in england and in early charleston, but talk a bit about, i guess, that struggle and how you overcame it in bringing your subject to life in the book and then walking us through his life until his death, i believe, at the age of 66. >> sure. before i do that, i do want to say that i wanted to mention jack knows this pretty well, but catesby's first plate in the natural history of carolina was the bald eagle.

speaking of ecological relationships, the bald eagle persuaded an osprey to gift the eagle a fish that the osprey has caught and you have the osprey in the background looking, i'm not sure what the expression is. [laughter] >> anyway, that's plate one of the natural history. >> yeah, i love that. i love that image and, but, yes, the sources were a little thin on the ground. we have no known image of catesby himself. we have no letters of his before he reaches south carolina at age 39, so i basically took it as an opportunity to just nerd out on history in great britain, of the intellectual ferment, the dazzling work being done and the interest that so many british men and women had at that time in natural history and the sciences. you know, it was a scientific revolution. isaac newton