On Nov. 24, 1820, John James Audubon battled through “Bull rushes, Green Briars and Canes” to fell a White-headed eagle that he used for his drawing in Birds of America. The bird is famously known today as the Bald eagle. The status of the bird as the national emblem for the United States surely plays a large part in keeping the Bald eagle among the most valuable prints in Birds of America. Although, as far as Audubon was concerned, the bird could not have been more unworthy. “Suffer me, kind reader, to say how much I grieve that it should have been selected as the Emblem of my Country.” Audubon rails at length about the evilness of the Bald eagle and its propensity to harass, scavenge, steal, and kill. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) also had little regard for the national bird.
For my 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; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the Fishing-Hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. 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: the little King Bird, not bigger than a Sparrow, attacks him boldly, and drives him out of the district.
In his notes on the Bald eagle, Audubon also recorded, “Before steam navigation commenced on our western rivers, these Eagles were extremely abundant there, particularly in the lower parts of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the adjoining streams. I have seen hundreds while going down from the mouth of the Ohio to New Orleans, when it was not at all difficult to shoot them. Now, however, their number is considerably diminished, the game on which they were in the habit of feeding, having been forced to seek refuge from the persecution of man farther in the wilderness. Many, however, are still observed on these rivers, particularly along the shores of the Mississippi.”
In 1948, the Bald eagle met its toughest opponent when Paul Hermann Müller (1899-1965) received a Nobel Peace Prize for developing dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) into an insecticide. The production of DDT was not the first case nor the last case of science running amok when Rachel Carson (1907-1964) detailed in her book Silent Spring (1962) how Bald eagles and many other species of birds were consuming fish and other creatures that were contaminated with DDT to the level where the chemical started causing birds to lay eggs that were too fragile to incubate. Despite considerable resistance from chemical companies and farmers, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Bald eagles, like all other bird species harmed by DDT, are gradually building back their numbers only to face a host of other ways human activity continues to threaten their existence.