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.”
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 Eagle Center to educate the public about the bird, its history, and “the significance that the Bald Eagle holds for those who serve and have served our nation in the military.” (Perhaps saying more than they meant to, veterans would tell the former CEO of the center that the eagle was the symbol of what they did for the country.)