This song is from Grizzled: Love Letters to 50 of North America’s Most Understood Animals by Jason Bittel. Author’s copyright © 2026 and reprinted with permission from National Geographic.
The bald eagle is an absolute beast of a bird.
With a banana as sharp as a beak and a wingspan exceeding 6 feet, there aren’t many flying things on this continent that can top it. Heck, bald eagles can be even more impressive when perched on the ground, where they approach heights of 3 feet or more—or about as tall as a small human child. And if you ever see one of these white-headed, brown-bodied predators pierce a still-gasping salmon with thumb-sized claws and then shred that fish into bloody ribbons, well, you’ll understand why this dinosaur descendant is a predator to be reckoned with.
By the way, those claws? When they close, they effectively lock, thanks to a series of notches in the tendon that allow them to tighten ever tighter. In total, a bald eagle can grab its prey with a claw about 10 times stronger than a human hand is capable of. Now, despite being physically impressive specimens, there is one bald eagle trait that doesn’t live up to what you might have seen on TV – the patented bald eagle screech. In fact, any birder will tell you that the sky-splitting scream that accompanies bald eagles in most media depictions actually belongs to a red-tailed hawk. So what do bald eagles sound like?
“I always think bald eagles sound like they’re chuckling,” says Janet Ng, a wildlife biologist for the Canadian Wildlife Service. “Kind of a wheezing chuckle.”
That’s not the only thing we get wrong either. For although bald eagles are capable predators in their own right – they have telescopic vision and can see in the ultraviolet – they’re not above letting other animals do their job for them. In fact, Ben Franklin—American Enlightenment scientist and one of America’s Founding Fathers—famously argued against adopting the bald eagle as a national symbol for this very reason. “The bald eagle . . . is a bird of bad moral character. He does not make an honest living . . . [he] he is too lazy to fish for himself,” wrote Franklin. And this is actually true.
“Bald eagles are what we call kleptoparasites,” says Ng. “They will often steal food from other birds.” Despite what Franklin might have thought, however, being klepto is nothing to be ashamed of (as an animal, at least; nation-states are another matter).
In the wild, animals do whatever they have to do to survive. Hyenas steal from lions. Lions steal from hyenas. Bears steal from squirrels. Bears steal from bees. Bees steal from each other. And further. You could even say that kleptoparasitism makes the world go round.
And hey, did you know that the word “raptor”—which is often used to describe birds of prey—comes from the Latin verb rappingwhat does it mean to rob, rob or kidnap? So yes, bald eagles are like pirates, they come in and take what they want, when they want. But let’s not pretend that doing so has any moral weight.
When not flying, bald eagles also escape road kill or help scavenge food found in human waste or the city’s landfill. Again, none of this really means anything. You can know all this and still love bald eagles and slap them on t-shirts, stickers, and everything else.
By the way, Ng confirms that bald eagle infatuation is very much an American enterprise. People in Canada and Mexico see bald eagles as just another bird, impressive as it is. But no matter where you’re from, there’s another part of the bald eagle lore that people are starting to forget — that just a few decades ago, we nearly lost the birds to extinction.
Before Europeans colonized North America, bald eagles were almost everywhere there was a river, lake, or stream large enough to support large fish. In fact, a written account from New England in 1668 said that bald eagles were so plentiful that they were “infinite.” So much so that the settlers would sometimes feed them to their pigs.
The common name bald eagle comes from around the same time period and does not mean hairless. Rather, “piebald” comes from the Old English word “piebald,” which is still used today for horses and means alternating dark and light coloring. As in, the bald eagle’s dark brown body feathers compared to its white head feathers. Oh, and those white feathers usually don’t come in completely until the birds reach five years of age, so young eagles aren’t bald in any sense of the word.
Estimates vary and usually only include the United States of America, but during the colonial period, there may have been at least 50,000 breeding pairs and perhaps as many as half a million bald eagles soaring across the continent. Of course, that’s where things take a turn, too, because many people just weren’t that into birds.
“Vultures get a bad rap sometimes and we see that in many parts of the world,” says Ng. “Bald eagles get rid of bodies, and so if somebody goes out and sees a dead cow or a dead lamb and there’s a bald eagle sitting on top of it, then they immediately think the bird killed it.”
Similarly, in 1917, citing too much competition for their salmon harvest, the state of Alaska even instituted a bounty system that paid people to go out and kill as many bald eagles as possible. A single eagle brought in $2 from the state government, or at today’s prices, nearly $50. At the same time, bald eagles are rumored to sometimes kidnap human babies and fly away with them in their talons. Throw in a feathered hat fad that swept the United States in the wake of the American Civil War, and frankly, there was too much incentive to go out and kill bald eagles. More than 120,000 eagles have been killed during Alaska’s bounty system alone.
All of this would have been detrimental enough to the mainland bald eagle population. But then, we started killing bald eagles even more efficiently and completely by accident. When America entered World War II, wartime production instigated a shift from the United States’ main insecticide at the time, a natural compound known as pyrethrum, to another: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or as we’ve come to know it, DDT.
In the years following World War II, DDT overtook pyrethrum as the most popular insecticide on its own, and it worked well at its job—killing insects and other arthropods by disrupting the nervous system, while apparently not harming humans. Of course, today we know that high-dose exposures to DDT can cause all kinds of illness in humans, including vomiting and convulsions. It is also a possible carcinogen. But back then, it was thought to be harmless to mammals. “There are pictures and videos of children playing with the DDT that the trucks allegedly released as they drove down the neighborhood roads,” says Ng.
And another problem was brewing in silence. “The problem with DDT is that it stays in the environment and gets washed into the water, and then plants and small animals like insects and fish eat those little bits,” says Ng. Then other fish eat those animals, and other animals eat those fish, and the pesticide continues to concentrate as it moves up the food chain until eventually some of those poisoned fish are eaten by a bald eagle (scientists call this process bioaccumulation).
Curiously, DDT did not kill the birds outright, but caused their shells to collapse under the weight of the incubating adults. Fortunately, Ng says, scientists studying these birds noticed that the hatching rates were erratic, so even though the bald eagles didn’t fall from the sky en masse, scientists were able to identify the problem before it was too late. In 1972, the US banned DDT in most circumstances. Canada followed suit beginning in 1985, as did Mexico in 2000.
It took some time, but bald eagle populations have slowly recovered from a low of just 417 nesting pairs anywhere in the US in 1963 to about 316,700 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. And scientists estimate there are at least 100,000 more breeding pairs in Canada and Alaska.
The comeback has worked so well that Ng says many people he meets in Canada now don’t even realize the birds are nearly extinct. There’s even a scientific phrase for it. It’s known as the shifting reference syndrome, and it refers to how we perceive what we see in the natural world—smaller fish, fewer insects, the lack of large predators—as it always has been. But bald eagles and their return show that our baselines can shift in the other direction as well.
So if you should be lucky enough to see a bald eagle harassing an osprey for a fish, or perhaps clinging to a deer carcass on the side of the road, take a moment to reflect. I almost lost these giant, scary, silly gigglers forever.