Though the bald eagle is endemic to North America, an eagle was Zeus’s companion, a messenger of Jupiter, and served as the standard of the Roman legion. It is a symbol of American exceptionalism.ĭavis believes the bald eagle was selected as a national symbol for “all American” reasons, but his own evidence suggests that the Founding Fathers cribbed from the Greeks and Romans, as they did their architecture, oratory, and government. The bald eagle is not only a symbol of American might. It’s a dark comedy, however, because its lessons are not easily transferable to our broader, ongoing ecological catastrophe. The Bald Eagle is the rare natural history that plays as a comedy. That we didn’t-that we spared the species from extinction and even appear to have restored its population to its pre-republic size-is the source of the book’s bouncy optimism. We came very close to loving the bald eagle to death. Davis’s most surprising contribution is to show how adulation of the natural world can accelerate its destruction. And for most of that time Americans have subjected the birds to slander, torture, and mass slaughter.
Since the 18th century, the bald eagle has adorned government seals, medals, and currency, standing for integrity, vigilance, and strength. Until recently, the two birds have been complete strangers to each other. Why did Americans nearly drive America’s bird to extinction? In The Bald Eagle, Davis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Gulf, a clever history of “America’s Sea,” has written a double biography: a history of the species and a history of the symbol. Still, in fairness to Wilson, Nuttall, and McGuffey, it should be noted that the average female birth weight in the 19th century was barely over six pounds. Although he acknowledges that eagles do fly off with chickens, the five-pound limit puts most newborns out of range.
Davis’s defense rests on the finding that a bald eagle’s maximum cargo capacity is five pounds. As recently as 1930, an ornithologist with the Geological Survey refused to rule out baby snatchings in congressional testimony. The naturalist Thomas Nuttall wrote in 1832 of “credibly related” accounts of balds abducting infants, and the 1844 edition of McGuffey’s Reader, a primer in most American grade schools, told the story of an eagle that deposited a girl in its aerie on top of a rock ledge, amid the blood-spattered bones of previous victims. Alexander Wilson, in his foundational American Ornithology(1808–14), described a bald eagle dragging a baby along the ground and flying off with a fragment of her frock.
If Davis’s plea seems especially plaintive, that’s because it contradicts centuries of personal testimony and expert accounts.
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