Loving the Bald Eagle to Death

Americans have had a strange way of showing their admiration for this regal creature.

- Nathaniel Rich

Jack E. Davis wants it very clearly understood that a bald eagle cannot, in fact, pluck an infant girl from her carriage, carry her clenched between its talons to its nest, and feed her to its eaglets. Okay?

If Davis’s plea seems especially plaintive, that’s because it contradicts centuries of personal testimony and expert accounts. Alexander Wilson, in his foundational American Ornithology (1808–14), described a bald eagle dragging a baby along the ground and flying off with a fragment of her frock. The naturalist Thomas Nuttall wrote in 1832 of “credibly related” accounts of balds abducting infants, and the 1844 edition of McGuffey’s Reader, a primer in most American grade schools, told the story of an eagle that deposited a girl in its aerie on top of a rock ledge, amid the blood-spattered bones of previous victims. As recently as 1930, an ornithologist with the Geological Survey refused to rule out baby snatchings in congressional testimony. Davis’s defense rests on the finding that a bald eagle’s maximum cargo capacity is five pounds. Although he acknowledges that eagles do fly off with chickens, the five-pound limit puts most newborns out of range. Still, in fairness to Wilson, Nuttall, and McGuffey, it should be noted that the average female birth weight in the 19th century was barely over six pounds.

Why did Americans nearly 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.