What Does The American Bald Eagle Symbolize – This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter where our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Register here.
Jack E. Davis wants it to be very clearly understood that a bald eagle cannot, in fact, pluck an infant from its carriage, carry her knotted in its talons to its nest, and feed her to its eagles. Okay?
What Does The American Bald Eagle Symbolize
If Davis’ plea seems particularly plaintive, it’s because it contradicts centuries of personal testimony and expert accounts. Alexander Wilson, in his seminal American Ornithology (1808–14), described a bald eagle dragging a baby along the ground and flying off with a fragment of its dress. Naturalist Thomas Nuttall wrote in 1832 of “credibly related” stories of bald infant abductions, and the 1844 edition of McGuffey’s Reader, a primer in most American elementary schools, told the story of an eagle depositing a girl in its airspace atop a ledge of rock, among the blood-spattered bones of previous victims. As late as 1930, an ornithologist at the Geological Survey refused to rule out baby snatches in congressional testimony. Davis’ defense rests on the finding that a bald eagle’s maximum carrying capacity is five pounds. Although he acknowledges that eagles fly off with chicks, the five-pound limit puts most fledglings out of reach. Still, in fairness to Wilson, Nuttall, and McGuffey, it should be noted that the average female birth weight in the 19th century was just over six pounds.
Eagle Symbolism & Eagle Meaning
Why did Americans almost 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. Until recently, the two birds have been complete strangers to each other. Since the 18th century, the bald eagle has adorned government seals, medals and currency and stands for integrity, vigilance and strength. And for most of that time, Americans have subjected the birds to vilification, torture and mass slaughter. Davis’s most surprising contribution is to show how admiration of the natural world can accelerate its destruction. We came very close to loving the bald eagle to death.
That we didn’t—that we spared the species from extinction and even seem to have restored its population to its pre-Republic size—is the source of the book’s hopeful optimism. The Bald Eagle is the rare natural history play that plays like a comedy. It’s a dark comedy, though, because the lessons aren’t easily transferable to our wider, ongoing ecological disaster. The bald eagle is not just a symbol of American power. It is a symbol of American exceptionalism.
Davis believes the bald eagle was chosen as a national symbol for “all American” reasons, but his own evidence suggests that the Founding Fathers drew from the Greeks and Romans, as they did their architecture, oratory, and government. Although the bald eagle is endemic to North America, an eagle was a companion of Zeus, a messenger of Jupiter, and served as the standard of the Roman legion. Across cultures and millennia, dating back to Mesopotamia, the eagle has been a dominant heraldic figure; Charlemagne had one, as did Napoleon, and Saladin’s eagle survives in much of the Arab world’s coats of arms. Eagles can be found on the national flags of Mexico, Egypt and Zambia, among others, a trend not hindered by the bird’s most prominent symbolic achievement, as the Third Reich’s swastika-fighting emissary.
In the earliest years of the American republic, the most significant objection to using the bird as a national symbol came from Benjamin Franklin (in private correspondence he argued that the turkey was “much more respectable”), although Davis cannot be sure whether he joked. Davis can say with certainty that the idea of using a bald eagle for the great seal came from Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, although the source of his inspiration, Davis writes, “is anyone’s guess.”
Profound Symbolism And Spiritual Meaning Of The Powerful Bird Eagles
The Bald Eagle is a shaggy dog. It proceeds according to the principles of accretion, without any eagle facts, or eagle-like facts, remaining. We are told that Alexis de Tocqueville and other European explorers “passed by” places with Eagle in their names (“Eagle River,” “Eagle Rock,” “Eagle Mountain”); that Zebulon Pike met Indians named Big Eagle, Black Eagle, and War Eagle; that Hudson River painters tended not to depict the bird (“unclear” why). Abraham Lincoln’s early followers called him “young eagle,” and Bill Clinton’s Secret Service codename was “Eagle.” An etymological debate about whether bald refers to the whiteness of the eagle’s head, its plinth color, or the word’s secondary definition as “fresh” also ends without verdict.
Out of the trivia, however, emerges a touching portrait of a species victimized by its own evolutionary successes. Intelligent enough to pursue a life of crime, the bald complements his hunting by robbing ospreys as they fly back to their nest. Other birds engage in kleptoparasitism, but the violent glory of the bald eagle’s aerial robbery gave it a reputation for laziness and immorality. Its maddened cackling (a “terrible screech,” John James Audubon described it) didn’t help. When eagles were first shown in sound films, editors dubbed a red-tailed hawk’s call to avoid alarming viewers, much like a bird Singin’ in the Rain.
Bald Eagles are unusually devoted spouses and parents. They mate for life and tend not to move home unless forced to, making them easy marks for hunters. Their tendency to hatch only two eaglets per clutch made them particularly vulnerable to egg snatching (for centuries a popular pastime in both Europe and North America) and, after World War II, to DDT contamination, which deteriorated their eggshells. Until the middle of the 20th century, the bald eagle did not receive a federal protection designation. The idea would have seemed absurd: The species offered humanity no significant benefits. Eagles competed with hunters for small game and tormented livestock. They were therefore treated like rats, wolves or other disturbing animals. Americans killed them indiscriminately.
Davis can, before the 20th century, locate about four American citizens who publicly expressed compassion for the bald eagle. Walt Whitman wrote an ode to the bird’s acrobatic mid-air courtship ritual in Leaves of Grass, naturalist John Burroughs praised its “dignity”, and in 1831 an anonymous writer published an article called “The Eagle” which ran in a number of local newspapers. The correspondent describes seeing a bald eagle dive from a tree to attack a wild turkey. The author, fighting against his own instinct to kill the eagle, stops himself at the last second: “Awe and reverence prevented me. I felt him to be the emblem and inspiration of my country.” Faced with the bird’s majesty, he writes, “I shrunk to my own insignificance and have ever since been conscious of my own inferiority.”
Bald Eagle Size, Diet And History As A National Icon
This rare expression of human humility was echoed by Wilson, who was the country’s pre-eminent ornithologist before being eclipsed by Audubon. Despite his suspicions about the bald eagle’s taste for infant blood, Wilson wrote approvingly of the bird’s vigor, energy, and longevity. Eagles were “not inferior in their way, only so in the human mind.” It took courage to write this, at the time.
Conventional wisdom followed the verdict of Audubon—”the foremost bird butcher of his time,” as author Joy Williams has described him—who comes across as a bloodthirsty monster, even by the standards of his age. Audubon wrote abominably about eagles and never missed an opportunity to kill them. Davis recounts Audubon’s satisfaction at shooting a female as she sat warming her eggs, and the agonizing screams of a female buzzing overhead while Audubon and his men tortured her mate.
“No animal in American history,” Davis writes, “has been the object of both reverence and accusation at the same time.” And no single bird embodied both extremes better than Old Abe, who was born in Wisconsin at the outbreak of the Civil War. Before he was old enough to escape, an Ojibwa chief cut down his resting tree, killed his lone sibling, and fought his parents. The chief traded Abe to a tavern owner for a bushel of corn. A company of Union soldiers adopted Abe as their mascot and took him into service, draping his neck in ribbons of red, white and blue.
Old Abe posed for photographs, signed autographs and was brought into battle. He learned to dance to a fiddle, shake hands with a claw and kill chickens on command. His symbolic power crossed enemy lines: Confederate soldiers vowed “to take that eagle dead or alive.” In an attempt to obtain poetic justice, he attempted to escape after his tethers were severed by a Minié ball; he flew 50 feet before his driver, racing through gunfire, recaptured him. He was shot twice, but the bullets “did little more than ruffle his feathers.” (Davis has a tremendous weakness for clichés, especially birdy ones.) Generals Grant and Sherman tipped their hats when
Why Is The Bald Eagle The Symbol Of America?
What does the eagle symbolize, what does the bald eagle symbolize in native american culture, bald eagle american, american bald eagle endangered, american bald eagle cam, american bald eagle habitat, the american bald eagle facts, american bald eagle information, american flag bald eagle, what does bald eagle symbolize, does the bald eagle migrate, what does the bald eagle symbolize in america
