The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the American Bald Eagle
- Paul D. Wilke
- 3 minutes ago
- 18 min read
The bald eagle’s transformation from an icon to a pest and back again didn't happen because of any changes in the bird itself but because of changes in our perceptions of it. This is perhaps obvious, but it’s worth emphasizing: in the Anthropocene, a creature’s fate is determined by our perception of it.
After all, we perceive livestock as food or clothing and treat it as such. We perceive pets as beloved companions and treat them as such. But with wild animals, it's different, even if they can’t escape our influence. They don’t exist to serve our physical and emotional needs; they remain distant and elusive, yet we still tend to anthropomorphize them. No more is this true than with the bald eagle, whose wildly varying fortunes have been tied to our perceptions.
In her 1963 book, Raccoons & Eagles, Polly Redford observed about the dangers of anthropomorphizing: “A bird is not noble any more than a dog is faithful, a pig greedy, a donkey stubborn, or a fox sly” (Redford 1965, 135). She's right, especially when it comes to eagles, which existed in the early American psyche as two radically different birds: one a revered symbol of American greatness; the other a pest of "bad moral character." These shifting perceptions have varied over the last two centuries, which is what I want to explore below.
The bald eagle wasn’t the first choice for our nation’s seal, nor was it the second or third, either. In 1776, the Continental Congress tasked none other than John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin to design a seal. Contrary to pop mythology, Franklin didn’t want the turkey. Instead, he proposed a scene with Moses parting the Red Sea to swallow up the Pharaoh’s army. At the bottom of this famous biblical event would be the motto: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” (Redford 1965, 124).
Adams, not to be outdone, had his heart set on an image of Hercules resting on his club, contemplating virtue and vice. Jefferson rounded off this exercise in baroque symbolism by calling for a pillar of fire in the clouds on one side and, on the other, Hengist and Horsa, two thuggish fifth-century Saxon colonizers of England. Fortunately, they couldn’t agree on any of these questionable ideas, so they tabled the matter until after the war (Redford 1965, 124).
Then, Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, took this hodgepodge of symbols, discarded most of them, and added the bald eagle surrounded by a hodgepodge of fresh symbols. The beak carried the motto: “E Pluribus Unum.” The two awkwardly splayed talons also did symbolic work. In the right talon, the Assyrian olive branch of peace; in the left, the Greek thunderbolts of war. This was enough to garner Congressional approval on 20 June 1782 (Redford 1965, 130–131).
What did the eagle offer that Hengist and Horsa couldn’t? The iconic raptor that made it onto the new Republic's seal was admired for its nobility, ferocity, and courage. Its fierce gaze gave off strong “don’t tread on me” vibes that characterized the self-perception of many Americans at the time.
But there was more to it: Our Revolutionary-era leaders, steeped in classical mythology, also understood that the noble eagle was Zeus’s messenger. Not only that, but the mighty Roman legions once carried the eagle atop their standards as they conquered the Mediterranean (Beans 1996, 59-61).
Looking to nature, they viewed it as the majestic lord of the avian world, a creature not to be messed with, just like the young Republic. Even better, this was “our” eagle, native to North America, with its white-headed plumage giving it a distinctive appearance. All of this made it the perfect image for America (Davis 2023, 62).
Nevertheless, a minority faction remained hostile. Ben Franklin lamented its selection as the nation's symbol. In a 1784 letter to his daughter, he wrote: “For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly....With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward” (“Benjamin Franklin” 1784).
Franklin’s unambiguous disdain wasn’t an outlier. Ornithologists of the 19th century agreed with Franklin. The most notable hater was John James Audubon, the founder of The Audubon Society and, perhaps, the only household name in ornithology.
In his 1834 "Birds of America," he left no doubt about where he stood. In a tour de force of anthropomorphizing that would have made Franklin proud, he described the bald eagle as “tyrannical” and having a “cruel spirit.” Audubon wrote, “Suffer me, kind reader, to say how much I grieve that [the bald eagle] should have been selected as the Emblem of my Country.” He agreed with Franklin, concluding that his opinion “perfectly coincides with my own” (Audubon 1834, 168).
As if to underscore the fickle nature of his anthropomorphizing, Audubon fell in love with another supposed eagle species he christened the "Bird of Washington," named after America’s first President (Beans 1996, 63). No such species existed. What he was admiring were actually juvenile bald eagles before their white plumage emerged.
One entry describes an 1832 outing on the St. Johns River in Florida. He had already killed five adult bald eagles that day when his group came upon an eyrie high up in a tree with three fledglings in it. Since their axes were too dull to chop the tree down — which was how he normally got his closeups — they just took pot shots at the eaglets. They hit two, which fell to the ground; the third was hit too, but collapsed back into the nest and presumably died there.
They hauled the two kills back to camp, where “…these young birds were skinned, cooked, and eaten by those who had been ‘in at the death.’ They proved good eating, the flesh resembling veal in taste and tenderness” (Audubon 1834, 162). I would describe Audubon’s attitude toward eagles (and birds in general) as Cartesian and reflecting a distinctly Western, scientific, rational, and mechanistic mentality toward non-human life.
Descartes denied that animals had rational minds and were therefore outside the scope of moral consideration. This Cartesian worldview combined humanity’s exclusive dual nature — for only we humans have bodies and souls — with the cold, mechanistic worldview of early science (Hatfield 2011, 404-405).
According to Descartes, animals were unfeeling automatons, and so we could just ignore the mechanical yelps of pain that they emitted. Given Audubon's long track record of casual killing in the name of science, it's fair to say that Descartes' perspective wasn't too far away from his own or those of his contemporaries.
To summarize this Cartesian framing for the sake of my argument: eagles were not perceived as subjects worthy of moral consideration. They were mere objects to be studied, no different, really, in sentience than plants. Perceived that way, they could be gunned down without any second thoughts.
Contrast this with the indigenous way of interacting with nature. However, I must be cautious here and not overgeneralize. No unified indigenous view of eagles existed, and it's worth noting that some hunted bald eagles for their feathers, which held great ceremonial and symbolic meaning. Luther Standing Bear noted that the capture and killing of an eagle required a ritual, and that much preparation was involved (Standing Bear 1931, 85–86).
In any case, none of them interpreted the natural world in such stark Cartesian terms. On the contrary, they viewed existence holistically. Eagles, humans, indeed, all life, were interconnected and sacred, each in their own special way. This made non-human creatures subjects in their own right, with agency, sentience, and moral value.
For native writers like Luther Standing Bear and Lakota holy man Lame Deer, nature was not some mechanistic machine composed of objects existing for our exploitation, but a vibrant web of relations in which every creature possessed meaning, dignity, and spiritual significance. Lame Deer said, “In an eagle, there is all the wisdom of the world” (Lame Deer and Erdoes 1972, 136).
Luther Standing Bear similarly described what such a world looked like: “The old people told us to heed wa maka skan, which were the 'moving things of earth.' This meant, of course, the animals that lived and moved about, and the stories they told of wa maka skan increased our interest and delight. The wolf, duck, eagle, hawk, spider, bear, and other creatures, had marvelous powers, and each one was useful and helpful to us” (Standing Bear 1931, 227).
In this spiritual reality, every something is perceived as a someone, with a purpose in the great circle of life. Or even in the next life: In the Lakota tradition, according to Standing Bear, the mighty eagle carried the soul into the afterlife, for only it had the power to make the journey (Standing Bear 1931, 246).
Unfortunately, this holistic perspective waned as the nineteenth century wore on. A more violent American version flipped the indigenous paradigm: If you weren't someone, you were some thing, and then woe to you. That said, Audubon's Cartesian inclinations were the least of the eagle's problems. It's true, ornithologists were prolific bird killers, but their numbers were few. Alas, for eagles, and just about all other wildlife, Manifest Destiny-inspired settlers were legion.
As they poured west, they fenced off land for cattle. Livestock thus served as the unwitting accomplice to settler colonialism. Their grazing presence translated into de facto ownership, while their value as economic units prioritized their welfare over that of native wildlife. What mattered was protecting one's financial assets. Any perceived threat needed to be eliminated.
This put the bald eagle in the crosshairs of gun-toting ranchers and farmers everywhere. Newspaper coverage from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries captured this dynamic. The bald eagle’s reputation as the national symbol had been eclipsed by its perception as a pest. A few examples can illustrate this point.
In 1904, a Marion, Illinois, paper reported that a Mr. Mitchell killed a “large bald eagle” he found perched on a fence of his pig enclosure (“Family Tradition” 1904). Or consider this 1898 report from Fisher Island, New York: “J.C. Newton, the foreman of the Fishers Island farm, killed a bald eagle on the island yesterday….Mr. Newton was driving along in his team, and as he sighted the bird, he jumped out and attacked it with the butt end of his whip. The eagle showed some fight and it was some time before the foreman could kill it” (“Fisher’s Island” 1898).
Mr. Newton then took his kill into town to show it off and have it stuffed by a taxidermist. At the end of the article, mention is made of another eagle recently seen flying near a farm’s ducks and chickens, signaling to readers how to interpret their presence. These newspaper articles often noted the eagles’ proximity to livestock and poultry, implying that they directly (Mr. Mitchell’s pigs) or indirectly (Mr. Newton’s poultry) were a threat.
It wasn’t enough to accuse eagles of swooping down and making off with a farmer’s duck or chicken. That no doubt happened, but a more incredible mythology evolved, of giant eagles devouring children and much larger animals like calves, lambs, and goats. Tall tales from faraway lands sometimes appeared in local newspapers. Take this one-sentence blurb from the Washington Times Herald in June 1913: “The bones of a child and the remains of 200 ducks, forty rabbits, a chamois, and a fox were found in an eagle’s nest in the Alps” (“Child Killed” 1913).
Of course, we should be wary of such fantastical reporting. Bald eagles feed mostly on fish, though they’re opportunistic hunters, willing to kill other birds or take their food. But even the largest ones can’t fly off with anything larger than a rabbit. Jack Davis notes that five pounds is the limit of what an eagle can lift (Davis 2023, 462). Yet the damage to its reputation was done. The bald eagle was not only perceived as a threat to livestock but also to small children.
Much of the newspaper reporting on bald eagles between 1880 and 1920 reflected this tone. It didn't matter if these stories were true or not. People read them and internalized the negative stereotypes, like this from the New York Herald in 1905: “The great American bald eagle is an illustration of the truth that fine feathers do not make fine birds. For, sad to relate, the original of our national emblem is a scavenger, a coward, and a thief” (“Bald Eagle’s Bad Habits” 1905).
How little had changed since Franklin and Audubon.
The initial conception of the eagle as the national bird hadn't died out entirely, though. It sometimes mingled in strange ways with indiscriminate eagle-killing. A 1928 article from the Columbia Missourian captures this tension: “A perfectly marked American Bald Eagle was killed by Fred Solto of St. Charles a few weeks ago when it swooped upon decoy ducks within range of his hunting blind. This species is almost extinct. The bird has been mounted and placed in front of a courtroom in the St. Charles County Courthouse” (“Bald Eagle Killed” 1928).
Nearing extinction or not, it would make a fine decoration in a county courtroom.
In Alaska, one of the eagle's last refuges, the perceived threat wasn’t to livestock but to fisheries, which led to astounding claims that the raptors were stealing enormous quantities of fish raised for human consumption. In 1920, an Alaskan wrote a letter published in the New York Times: "There is no agency more destructive to the fish and game of this country than the American eagle” (Davis 2023, 230). This was preposterous, but it still impacted legislation.
In 1917, Alaska instituted a bounty for each eagle killed, starting at 50 cents and rising to $1 in 1923. By 1927, some forty thousand bounties had been paid (Pack 1928, 23). Alaska was well on the way to eradicating its own population, but in a much more systemic and incentivized way than the rest of the country.
In a 1928 article titled “Blood Money for Eagles,” Arthur Newton Pack noted how bounties became legal based on the dubious testimony of a few individuals blaming eagles for the declining salmon industry, rather than looking for other reasons like overfishing (Pack 1928, 23). Not surprisingly, the bald eagle’s pest status made them targets, but this time the government rewarded hunters for doing what they had already been doing for free for decades: killing eagles.
Here we've reached the first nadir in the bald eagle’s fortunes. While hunters and ranchers were still shooting on sight, change was in the air. Arthur Pack ended his article with a call for an end to the bounties and tolerance toward a creature which was, after all, just acting according to its nature: “Let us allow him an occasional fish, or a duck or a fowl, not only in Alaska, but all over our land. Let us hold his image in reverence not only on our coins but in our hearts” (Pack 1928, 26).
Pack’s muted plea marked a broader shift in awareness emerging at around this time. Decades of indiscriminate killing of wildlife confronted the growing sense that the environment was not an infinite resource to be plundered, but a precarious and precious inheritance to be cherished, or else. This inspired the rise of the modern conservation movement. For the bald eagle, this couldn’t have come at a better time.
Just a year later, in 1929, a zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Willard Gibbs Van Name, upset the decorous birdwatching community with a fiery pamphlet, “A Crisis in Conservation," that called out the Audubon Society and the Biological Survey for their lack of action in protecting birds of prey like the bald eagle.
Van Name accused both organizations of complacency in the face of Alaska’s bounties. He went further, accusing them of publishing “largely anti-eagle propaganda” that gave readers the “idea that the eagle is pretty destructive of game and fish and that it is not in danger of extinction” (Miller, Van Name, and Quinn 1931, 12).
And, he asked, what had America’s most influential bird-loving organizations done to protect bald eagles? “One word will do it. Nothing” (Miller, Van Name, and Quinn 1931, 14).
Van Name was correct: The anti-eagle bias remained entrenched in the Audubon Society’s leadership. Though the pamphlet created quite a stir among the membership, the Society decided the best defense was no offense: they simply ignored it. Van Name’s employer, the American Museum of Natural History, which had close ties to the Audubon Society, put a gag order on Van Name, forbidding him from publishing anything else without its permission.
That should have been it, but it wasn't.
Enter Rosalie Edge.
You see, someone had read “A Crisis in Conservation” and was moved to action. That someone was Rosalie Edge, whose fiery determination and unflagging spirit gave America’s struggling icon the champion it so desperately needed. She devoted the rest of her life to changing the public's perception of it.
At a glance, she was an unlikely champion. She wasn’t a university-trained ornithologist, though she perhaps understood more about raptors than most of them did. She was a former suffragette and autodidact who had no problem whatsoever challenging complacent men in power. In fact, her feminist activism made her quite skilled at it. After reading Van Name’s pamphlet, the two met in New York and became lifelong friends and allies. Van Name had been silenced; Ms. Edge had not (Davis 2023, 238).
She decided to crash the Audubon Society’s annual meeting at the Museum of Natural History. As a lifetime member, she could attend the annual meeting and direct questions to the Society's esteemed Board of Directors, a right she intended to exercise in full. In a room filled with Audubon stalwarts, she rose again and again to interrogate the Board about the charges laid out in “A Crisis in Conservation.” Her tone was polite, but her questioning had the relentless quality of a prosecutor.
How, she asked, was the Society addressing the plight of the bald eagle and other birds threatened with extinction? What was the Society doing to promote protective legislation? (“One word will do it. Nothing”) Why didn’t they take a more aggressive public stance in Bird Lore, the Society's flagship publication?
Her questions kept coming, one after the other, with little regard for the fact that she was cutting into the meeting's wider agenda. To shut her up and move on with the meeting so they could all get to lunch, the Society's flustered President, Gilbert Pearson, promised that he'd look into the matter “in due course” (Furmansky 2010, 111).
Edge's performance got everyone’s attention in a very public venue that the Audubon Board couldn’t silence. Pearson tried to make it all go away. He tried ignoring her, which he should have known by then wouldn’t work. Eventually, he wrote and said the quiet part out loud: He didn't believe that the Audubon Society was strong enough to overcome the anti-eagle farming lobby and therefore shouldn’t try.
Same with the Alaskan bounty. Public sentiment in Alaska was so dead set against the bird that it was best to avoid the subject altogether. Such a limp lack of fighting spirit appalled Edge (Furmansky 2010, 113). If they wouldn’t put up a fight, she would.
From this now legendary (in bird circles, anyway) confrontation, a movement took flight. Edge wasn’t a woman to be brushed off and silenced. Her pointed and public questions attracted a small but dedicated cadre of allies, including Van Name and veteran journalist Irving Brant. Together, they vigorously took the case to the public in the years that followed. Indeed, she would be a thorn in the side of Audubon Society's national leadership until it changed its policies.
She founded her own publication and an organization called the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), which served as a counterpoint and watchdog to the national Audubon Society. They published short educational pamphlets which were intended to counter the public's long-standing hostility toward eagles.
The ECC did some anthropomorphizing of its own, humanizing bald eagles by noting that they were devoted parents, which they were, and that they weren't the vicious killers of children, which they weren't. Also, Edge obtained the Audubon Society's mailing list of all 11,000 of its paying members; she ensured they all received the ECC's publications, assuming, rightly it turns out, that there were many more silent conservationists out there who wanted to protect eagles and hawks as much as she did (Furmansky 2010, 135). Local chapters began to pressure their states' congressional delegations to take a more activist stance on the issue (Davis 2023, 243).
It worked beyond their wildest dreams. The ECC didn’t have to rely on its own pamphlets for long to get the word out. The print media responded with positive coverage. In 1930, Popular Science published a short but uncompromising article called “The American Bald Eagle is Nearing Extinction” ("American Bald Eagle," 62).
Change started happening fast. The first national bill to protect bald eagles appeared in Congress in 1935, though it wouldn’t be passed until the 1940 Bald Eagle Protection Act. Soon after, Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law. By then, he was an ardent supporter of Edge’s ECC and the bald eagle. He endorsed an ECC teaching pamphlet. “I share with you,” he wrote, “the wish to see these birds adequately protected by law” (Davis 2023, 246).
It was an amazing accomplishment by Edge and a small but dedicated team of activists, an inspiring example that even tiny, grassroots movements can make a difference. They had also done a lot to change public opinion and debunk fantastical myths about bald eagles killing babies and livestock. While their work was critical in shifting perceptions, other factors also made Americans more receptive to their arguments.
First, the bald eagle's scarcity outside Alaska couldn’t be ignored. An awareness of the eagle's absence where it had once been common created a sense of urgency. Moreover, bald eagles couldn't be seen as pests if they weren't around. It became easier for people to embrace an idealized image of a bird they no longer encountered in real life. Many media outlets from this era picked up on the connection between the bald eagle as the national bird and the uncomfortable fact that Americans had hunted it to the point of extinction.
A Miami News article from 1939 debunked the child-killing myths, criticized indiscriminate hunting, and concluded with the following: “If that [extinction] happened, we should be in the embarrassing position of having as national emblem a bird dead as the dodo — not a cheering symbol for any country” (“Misunderstood Eagle” 1939).
Though eagle populations would take decades to recover, the Bald Eagle Protection Act criminalized their killing. This was a start. But darker days were yet to come. Alaska, exempted from the Act, continued paying bounties until 1952, when a federal ban superseded state regulations. In the end, however, 129,273 bounties had been paid (Ross 2017, 313).
Public perceptions may have shifted decisively in favor of the bald eagle, but the pesticide DDT brought them to the brink once more by the 1960s, when estimates placed fewer than 487 breeding pairs in the U.S. outside Alaska. DDT, intended to kill mosquitoes, made its way into the waterways where the fish lived that were a big part of the bald eagle’s diet.
Consuming poisoned fish caused eagles to lay eggs with thin and brittle shells that broke before they could hatch (Davis 2023, 283).
Still, the perception-changing work done by earlier generations of conservationists, such as Edge and Van Name, had evolved into a far more influential environmental movement by the 1960s.
Other efforts, including Rachel Carson's eye-opening book, Silent Spring, nudged the public and the federal government toward banning DDT once it was identified as the egg-thinning culprit.
What followed was an amazing recovery that’s continued to this day, so much so that I’ve occasionally encountered bald eagles near my home in rural central Illinois, something that would have been unthinkable during my childhood here in the 1980s.
The Nixon Administration was the catalyst for this population surge. DDT was eventually banned in 1972; the Clean Water Act of 1972 helped clean up America’s waterways, from which eagles fed; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 gave even more protections for eagles.
In the perfect illustration of how much had changed, activists advanced environmental agendas grounded in the idea of the "web of life,” or that every creature has a critical role in maintaining a balanced ecosystem. Messing with that balance can have devastating ripple effects. Sound familiar? This was hardly an original discovery of Western environmental science. Indigenous peoples had understood this as basic common sense for eons (Davis 2023, 309).
The National Wildlife Federation began offering $500 rewards for information leading to the conviction of anyone who killed an eagle. Imagine that! Now, those who reported eagle killers received the bounties (Davis 2023, 309). Federal laws became stricter: up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine (Davis 2023, 346).
Populations recovered enough for bald eagles to be reclassified from endangered to threatened in 1995, and then delisted in 2007 when an estimated 10,000 breeding pairs flourished across the lower 48 states. By 2021, that number had exploded to over 71,000 breeding pairs, marking a spectacular recovery (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service 2021).
That makes this a rare conservation victory, proof that, sometimes, anyway, what we ruin we can restore. Perhaps we can find some somber hope in that realization. Perceptions matter; they can make us kill without remorse. They can make us justify factory farms filled with misery.
Perceptions can move us to empathy or apathy, to love or hate, to anything, really. This matters. It bears repeating. For good or ill, the fate of the environment and all the living creatures that inhabit it (including homo sapiens) depend on us now like never before.
If there is any other takeaway in this era of bleak environmental pessimism, it's that positive changes can come from the most unexpected places.
This doesn’t have to end badly.
References
American Bald Eagle Is Near Extinction." Popular Science, March 1930, 62.
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