Bald Eagle Day

What the day is

Bald Eagle Day is observed on January 14. The bald eagle has been the national emblem of the United States since 1782, and its recovery is one of the clearest conservation successes on record.

Origin and background

By the early 1960s the species was down to roughly four hundred nesting pairs in the lower forty-eight states. Shooting and habitat loss started the decline, and the pesticide DDT very nearly finished it. DDT accumulated up the food chain into fish-eating birds and interfered with the formation of eggshells, so eagles laid eggs too thin to survive being incubated. The adults were not being killed; they were simply failing to produce young, year after year.

The response was legal. DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States in 1972, and the bird received federal protection. Numbers climbed steadily for decades, and the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list in 2007, with populations now in the tens of thousands of pairs.

Two things about the bird itself are commonly misunderstood. Bald does not mean featherless: it comes from an older sense of the word meaning white-headed, and that white head does not appear until the bird is four or five years old, so young eagles are mottled brown and are frequently mistaken for golden eagles.

And the call is wrong in almost every film. The bald eagle makes a thin, chirping, rather unimpressive sound. The piercing scream used on screen belongs to a red-tailed hawk, dubbed over because the real thing does not sound the part.

How to take part

• Go and look. Winter is good viewing, as eagles gather near open water where fish are reachable.
• Listen to a real recording of the call, then to any film with an eagle in it.
• Learn to recognize the mottled immature birds, which are widely missed.
• Keep well back from nests, which are protected and easily disturbed.
• Read what DDT did, which is the reason the recovery was possible.