An Urban's Rural View

The American bald eagle is one of the most heartwarming comeback stories of recent years. There's something about the rebound of this majestic raptor with its telltale white head and white tail that has captured Americans' imaginations.

As someone who is frequently out in the field looking at birds, I can attest to this widespread enthusiasm. Seeing me wearing binoculars and toting a spotting scope, folks who aren't birders, many just out for a stroll, often approach me on the trail to tell me about bald eagles they've seen. Or to ask, excitedly, "Have you seen the eagles?"

We came perilously close to not being able to see them. Part One of the eagle's two-part comeback saga is the bird's recovery from near extinction a half century ago. A triple whammy of habitat loss, hunting and DDT poisoning had decimated the population of Haliaeetus leucocephalus, the species' scientific name.

Eagle populations swooned for decades, even after passage in 1940 of the Bald Eagle Protection Act, which made any "take" of a bald eagle illegal. By the 1960s the bird's numbers had declined to 417 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states. (https://www.govinfo.gov/…)

In 1972, New York state was down to one breeding pair. At least it had one; the last bald eagle nest in Massachusetts had been recorded in 1905.

Today the bald eagle is back. Thanks to federal legislation, including the Endangered Species Act, to the banning of DDT and to reintroduction efforts by governments and conservation groups, the species was taken off the endangered-species list in 2007. In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the bald eagle population in the lower 48 states at 316,700 birds, with 71,467 occupied nests.

Part Two of the comeback story is related to Part One. It's the recovery of the bird's popularity after a very long period in which it was widely detested.

I didn't know about that period until a few years ago when I read Jack Davis's book "The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird." (https://wwnorton.com/…)

During that period, Davis tells us, eagles weren't just hunted; they were poisoned and strangulated, too.

Many Americans had come to despise the eagle for its habit of stealing fish from osprey and other birds. Benjamin Franklin helped promote this sentiment; he criticized the eagle as lazy and "of bad moral character."

Biologists have a word for this fish-stealing behavior: kleptoparasitism. Some might see it as a clever survival strategy in a survival-of-the-fittest world. But, like Franklin, many Americans regarded it as a character flaw.

Fear of eagles stealing sheep and other livestock added to the bird's unpopularity. Some Americans even believed that bald eagles snatched human children. Ornithologists say there are no documented cases of this, but a 1908 silent film, "Rescued From an Eagle's Nest," dramatized the notion. The movie's hero drops into an eagle's nest, kills the eagle and rescues the baby.

The bald eagle's status as a national symbol didn't make a dent in the fear and loathing. The founders didn't make the eagle the national bird but in 1782 they included the bird in the Great Seal of the United States, a version of which you can see on the back of the dollar bill.

There's a reference to the bird's presence on the greenback in "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," a song that became popular in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The lyrics include the line, "If I ever get my hands on a dollar again, I'm going to hang on to it until that eagle grins."

In the 20th century, the eagle regained favor in the hearts of Americans. We can't be sure why, exactly; public opinion polling didn't really get started until the 1930s.

It probably went hand in hand with the rise of environmentalism. Another trend that may have played a role was fewer people worried about livestock thefts. Between 1900 and 1969, employment in agriculture fell from more than 11 million to fewer than four million. (https://www.statista.com/…)

"The Eagle has landed," astronaut Neil Armstrong famously said when the lunar module of that name touched down on the moon in July of 1969. Today Armstrong's declaration applies to the bird after which the module was named.

Thanks to legislation passed and signed last December, the bald eagle has finally become the national bird. With that, the comeback story is complete. Americans can truly say, "The eagle has landed."

Postscript: A recent internet video had an eagle swooping down on an alligator and flying away with the reptile. I suspect the video was either photoshopped or the product of AI imagination. Ornithologists doubt eagles have the weightlifting ability to carry a human infant very far, much less an alligator.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

(c) Copyright 2025 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.