The Tragedy and Redemption of Bald Eagles

An avian rollercoaster ride with Professor Jack E. Davis

With lots of people in the States on holiday this week, celebrating July 4th, I thought I’d share some history about the bald eagle, our national symbol. Though we love the bald eagle today, Professor Jack E. Davis reveals that Americans haven’t always been so hot on the majestic bird.

Professor Davis is a history professor at the University of Florida and the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies. He’s the author or editor of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. His latest book, The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and chosen by the LA Times as one of the top five nonfiction books of 2022. Amazon and Apple also selected The Bald Eagle as one of the best nonfiction books of 2022.

In conversation, Professor Davis and I traced the rollercoaster history of bald eagles from abundance to near extinction (twice) and back again. A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation (open to all subscribers), which includes further discussion of the emotions that eagles feel (like love!), one woman’s successful campaign to end Alaska’s eagle bounty in the early 20th century, and my musings on the merits of super glue to mend eagle eggs and Achilles’ tendons:

Professor Davis found my conspiracy theory about filmmaking birds very compelling

Ben: Professor Davis, thank you for being here.

JD: Thank you for having me.

Ben: Today I'd like to explore America's rocky relationship with bald eagles. To begin, can you discuss Native views of eagles? I most often see balds in northern Manhattan, which was once Lenape land, so maybe we can use that as a launch point.

JD: Sure. We have to be careful not to lump all Native peoples into one undifferentiated whole—they represented hundreds if not thousands of cultures. But the Lenape’s views were like a lot of other Native groups across North America. 

For many of those cultures, the bald eagle was a spirit bird that delivered messages from the living to lost ancestors or to a higher spirit. Bald eagles for many Native groups were part of religious ceremonies and rituals involving body parts, like talons, and feathers. 

Ben: In addition to history, there’s a lot of science interspersed throughout your book. I was surprised to learn how many feathers bald eagles have!

JD: Yes, approximately 7,000.

Ben: I can only imagine the length of their morning routine. 

Fast forwarding, can you discuss the debate over the Great Seal of the United States? For a long time, colonists revered eagles, but by the 1770s, people like Benjamin Franklin weren’t so hot on them.

JD: Well, readers might be familiar with the popular perception that Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be on the Great Seal, instead of the eagle.

That’s not true, although he did insist the turkey was an honest and hardworking bird, while the bald eagle was a craven thief because it stole fish from ospreys and other eagles. 

Ben: You note how Franklin attributed eagles’ thieving habits to “sloth and moral depravity.” Scientists now view stealing as a sign of intelligence—that taking other animals’ food is a smart way to conserve energy. And there's a name for this practice, “kleptoparasitism.”

JD: That’s right.

Ben: I've had E. coli and salmonella poisoning, and here I thought I was kleptoparasitic.

JD: Involuntarily, it sounds like.

Interestingly enough, Ben Franklin was on the first committee that Congress appointed on July 4th, 1776 to design a seal, along with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. They failed miserably, and it wasn’t until six years later that Charles Thompson, the secretary of Congress, recognized that America would soon be going to Paris to sign a peace treaty and needed something to stamp into that parchment. Bald eagles were pretty much a daily sight in Philadelphia and Thompson had the idea to put the eagle on the front of the Great Seal. 

Americans immediately fell in love with that image. They started adding the eagle to everything: business cards, military insignia, etc. And yet while they loved the image, they hated the species itself.

Ben: You describe this as “the paradox of the eagle.” Could you talk about early ornithologists' views of bald eagles? As you write, “the most exalted ornithologist hated America’s most exalted bird.”

JD: Right, John James Audubon hated the bald eagle. 

You have to understand that ornithology in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was really about collecting and identifying birds. The field did not go deeply into studying the behavior of birds or even the birds’ relationship with their larger environment. Audubon was out there with his gun, shooting and collecting them so he could paint them later. 

And Audubon, like other ornithologists, bought into myths about the depravity of the bald eagle. Moreover, as Americans sought their “manifest destiny,” expanding westwards, they treated the bald eagle like a predator, much as they did wolves, coyotes, bears, and mountain lions. Audubon and countless others accused balds of stealing away with calves, pigs, and goats. Mothers were also advised not to leave their infants outside alone, lest a bald eagle carry it away to their nest.

None of this was possible. Sure, balds will fly away with a chicken any opportunity they get (as free-range chicken farmers have learned), but they can lift five pounds at most. 

Ben: You get the sense that anytime people in the late 1800s misplaced something large, they blamed eagles. It’s like if you forgot where your car was parked today and thought, must’ve been an eagle.

JD: And despite the myth having no veracity, it spread well into the 20th century. Americans really saw it as their civic duty to kill eagles.  

Ben: I noted that you conducted a Newspapers.com search for “bald eagle shot” from 1850 to 1920 and found over 180,000 results, which is stunning.

How did World War I mark both a low point and a turning point in the US’ relationship with the bald eagle?

JD: America entered the war in 1917, and in many places where eagles had been seen all the time—the eastern seaboard, parts of the midwest—balds were virtually absent. It got to the point that many people believed bald eagles were Rocky Mountain birds; that they just weren’t from the East, where they were once so prolific.

And really, it wasn’t until World War II that Congress began protecting them, thanks largely to the advocacy efforts of a growing chorus of citizens who feared the eagle would go the way of animals like the passenger pigeon. In 1940, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act, recognizing that we were denying the bird of freedom its own freedom on the cusp of World War II.

Sadly five years later, in August 1945, DDT was released to the open market.

Ben: Leading to the second almost extinction of bald eagles. 

JD: Yes, DDT became an immediate sensation in controlling insects, both in agriculture and as a household product for killing mosquitoes.

And I think virtually everybody knows this story, but bird life was devastated by the widespread use of the chemical. So was fish life. And bald eagles are fishing raptors, so DDT that made its way into waterways got into fish, and then into eagles.

Ben: By 1963, there was an all-time low of 487 bald eagle nesting pairs in the 48 states. Even still, producers kept on insisting it was safe for animals and humans. To prove the point, you describe an industry film where schoolchildren eating bologna and PB&J sandwiches were cannoned with DDT.

JD: I've often thought about those kids if that was indeed actual chemicals used.

Ben: Maybe the filmmakers were birds of prey, doing their best to get back at humanity.

Can you describe the restoration efforts that followed in the 70s and 80s? I was really interested in your conversation about “hacking.”

JD: 1972 was a watershed year for the bald eagle. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) strengthened the penalty under the Eagle Protection Act, which by then was called the Bald Eagle and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Congress also passed the Clean Water Act, which went a long way to cleaning up waters and helping bring back the marine life that bald eagles depend on. Also that year, the EPA banned the sale of DDT, a big, big move for lots of wildlife (and us).

And then four years later, in 1976, the FWS launched an eagle hacking program, initially in New York. In hacking, FWS went to places like Northern Michigan and Minnesota, where there were still somewhat healthy bald eagle populations, and they took eaglets out of nests—only the smallest ones that were least likely to survive—and relocated them to hack towers, which were essentially giant cages on stilts. Inside were eagles' nests, and FWS would help raise eaglets until they flew off into the nearby wild.

The program was a massive, massive success, and along with the spirit and perseverance of the eagles themselves, helped restore the bald eagle population. 

Ben: As you write, “It was not these steadfast birds that changed. They carried on as they always had, as neither immoral nor moral. What changed was American sensibilities.”

On a concluding note, can you comment on the uneven equilibrium that has developed between human and eagle populations rising alongside each other?

JD: The eagle was removed from the endangered species list in 2007. The Bald Eagle and Golden Eagle Protection Act still remains but is inconsistently enforced, depending on who’s in the White House. Under the law, you’re not supposed to build within 330 feet of an eagle’s nest, but exceptions are made all the time on behalf of real estate developers, for example. As the bald legal population is expanding, and as our own population is expanding, there are increasing conflicts between the two. 

That said, the majority of Americans don’t want to see eagles suffer any harm. They recognize that when eagles are healthy, the environment is healthy, which means we are better off, too. 

So the bald eagle’s history is fraught with tragedy, but it’s also one of redemption and restoration. Today the bald eagle population, continent-wide, is estimated to be the same as it was before European contact, right around 500,000, which I think is just spectacular.

Ben: You conclude, “If animals form a portrait of our virtues and vices, as many contend, then bald eagles have shown us in our... coexistence with them that our nature is predisposed to virtue.” 

A surprisingly nice synthesis, so thank you for that, Professor Davis, and thanks for speaking with me today.

JD: My pleasure, Ben. I really enjoyed it.