"The charismatic bird became more than a patriotic totem. It evolved into a measure of well Americans were advancing a healthier intercourse with nature, a place where people, not just wildlife, lived."
On the Fourth of July, patriotic imagery can be found just about everywhere - the flag, Lady Liberty, and, of course, the avian symbol of our nation, the bald eagle. It's hard to imagine an America without the eagle, and the story of how this iconic bird almost went extinct due to the pesticide DDT, and its subsequent rescue by eagle-loving Americans in the nick of time is one of the cornerstones of our US conservation mythos. And yes, that all happened. As it turns out, though, that's not the entire story. Pesticides and Silent Spring weren't the eagle's first brush with extinction. And the first time, the eagle's near-demise was much more deliberate.
In The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird, Pulitzer Prize winner Jack E. Davis tells the full story of the species, from its early natural history to its role in pre-Columbian America to the fateful moment when some bepowdered-bigwigs in Philadelphia put the eagle on the seal of an upstart new country. From the very beginning, America has had a two-sided relationship with the bald eagle. As a symbol, it was (and still is) adored, used in all sorts of patriotic imagery and lore. As for the real, live bird itself... there was considerably less enthusiasm.
Sure, Davis picks up that old chestnut about Benjamin Franklin wanting to make our national bird the turkey, not the eagle (which, as with many of our founding legends, has some truth behind it, but also a lot of mythologizing). Many early Americans, including naturalists such as John James Audubon, were dismissive of the eagle as a hunter, regarding it as a glorified vulture. Other, however, thought it was a hunter... and too good of a hunter at that, one which posed a threat not only to our fisheries and animal agriculture, but to small children as well. One of the earliest movies ever made, staring D. W. Griffith himself, is about a feather saving his baby from an evil eagle who has carried the child off for supper.
With such lousy PR, it's no wonder that for decades it was open-season on eagles. Even organizations which ostensibly should have been in the birds' corner, such as the National Audubon Society, brushed aside any concerns about saving the raptors.
The Bald Eagle is full of vignettes such as Griffith's movie, including "Old Abe," an eagle who was drafted as a Civil War mascot and saw active combat in the war, and the fascinating bureaucracy behind the National Eagle Repository, from which Native American tribes obtain eagle parts and feathers for ceremonies and regalia. There are times at which the narrative seems a little waylaid by sidetracks as Davis pursues one anecdote after another, especially pursuing the biographies of some of the many humans - politicians, artists, scientists, enthusiasts - who become intertwined with the story of this species.
That story is often held up as an example of American greatness - how when we, as a society, realized that we were on the verge of losing our national icon, we rallied to its defense and rescue, eventually resulting in its removal from the Endangered Species list. The real story of the eagle's decline is much darker; there are plenty of folks from the last century who, upon being told that the bird might go extinct, would have replied, "Good." Perhaps that's what makes the true story the better story, however - that our country was willing to change its collective mind about saving an endangered species - and if there was hope for saving the bald eagle, there might be reason to hope for other species as well.
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