The Bald Eagle Perfectly Embodies America’s Flaws

Our national bird isn’t what we believe it to be—but it is the perfect bird for an imperfect country.

Illustration by Sophie Lucido Johnson.

For over two centuries, the United States has invested its identity in the bald eagle as a noble apex predator, but the eagle of our national imagination distorts the real bird along lines that parallel our country’s deepest flaws. In truth, the bald eagle is a larcenous opportunist that gets by on brute strength. It issues no defiant scream . Yet we as a nation have come to identify a set of virtues in the bald eagle that we claim for ourselves—when, in truth, they are virtues we both lack.

Since 1782, the bald eagle has served as a ubiquitous symbol of the country’s defiant sovereignty, though it wasn’t officially the national bird until President Joe Biden signed a law declaring it as such in 2024. American settlers sought to distinguish their culture from Europeans’ through appeals to nature. In this Romantic context, the historian Jack E. Davis wrote in his 2022 book The Bald Eagle , the bird embodied colonial visions of a rugged, sublime, and endemically American wilderness. The bald eagle linked exceptional biodiversity to American exceptionalism.

Among the eagle’s other traits, its scream quickly gained mythic standing. From the Revolutionary War and the Civil War to World War II and beyond, Americans have revered the bird and its scream as a symbol of military might. But the eagle’s real voice is a Trumpian “snickering laugh expressive of imbecile derision,” in the words of one ornithologist.

Not all early Americans admired the bald eagle. Benjamin Franklin’s chief complaint was that the eagle was “ too lazy to fish for himself .” Bald eagles indeed feast on whatever they can find with as little effort as possible. They prefer fish, often pre-killed—if not caught by an osprey, then spent after spawning, struck by dam turbines, or suffocated in hypoxic waters.

Many disdained the bird’s “bad moral character,” as Franklin put it. Some criticisms were anthropomorphic, even personal: The early American naturalist William Bartram, writing on the eve of the country’s escalating colonization of the continent and aggression abroad, condemned the eagle as an “execrable tyrant.” The bald eagle, he wrote, “supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from all the feathered nations.” Unfair to the bird, certainly, but Bartram’s words would prove a fitting account of the country it represents.

The bald eagle’s scavenging and kleptoparasitism justified its persecution throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. With the endorsement of federal authorities, the ranchers and hunters who settled the frontier poisoned, trapped, and shot eagles that they blamed for stealing livestock and game. By 1930, Nature magazine observed that “it is rare that a killer of our eagle is punished in any manner,” even as a headline in Popular Science warned, “The American Bald Eagle Is Near Extinction.” By World War II, protecting the eagle became patriotic: Davis quotes one Texan as saying that “a person who would kill a bald eagle would trample the flag in the mud.”

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The fear of losing the eagle intensified in the mid-20th century—perhaps because of how we were losing the eagle. The pesticide DDT caused birds to lay eggs with thinner shells, which often broke, sometimes beneath the incubating mother. You didn’t need to be an augur to note the inauspicious symbolism of the nation’s avian avatar crushing its future under its own weight. The empire’s symbol could even be read as a symptom of mid-century reproductive anxiety. E.B. White fretted that “the bird of freedom,” thanks to chemists and farmers, “is sterile.”

Crushed eggs, oiled sea life, and burning rivers drove an environmental movement popular enough that, during a two-year span, the federal government enacted the Clean Water Act, the fledgling EPA’s DDT ban, and the Endangered Species Act. State programs took eaglets from healthy populations in Alaska, the Great Lakes region, and Florida and reintroduced the birds to areas where the species had been extirpated. By the time of the Bicentennial in 1976, recovery efforts had begun to turn the bald eagle’s trajectory around. Populations grew gradually , then exponentially.

“Rising from the past and reclaiming its place in nature,” Davis wrote, the eagle emerged as a symbol of American environmental triumph. In 1999, President Bill Clinton announced plans to remove the bald eagle from the endangered-species list. By 2007, when the Fish and Wildlife Service officially delisted the species, its population in the contiguous US was doubling as quickly as every eight years.

The eagle, saved, could return to the symbolic realm. Crowds gathered to admire recovered populations in places like Wabasha, Minnesota, where eagle flocks fished in the Mississippi River. Volunteer eagle watchers there founded the National Eag…