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The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird

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Best Books of the Month: Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Gulf, a sweeping cultural and natural history of the bald eagle in America.

The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction.

Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves—monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents—The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.

ISBN-13: 9781324094104

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation

Publication Date: 09-26-2023

Pages: 448

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

Jack E. Davis is the author of the award-winning The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea and An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. A professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, he lives in Florida and New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Introduction: Haliaeetus Leucocephalus: The Species 10

Part 1 A Bird for a New Nation

1 Two Myths 19

Searching for a Seal

2 Buttons and Coins 54

National Identity, National Expansion, and Everywhere the "Monarch of the Air"

3 Twice-Baked Turkey 89

The Bald Eagle in Early Science, or Ornithologists with Guns

Part 2 Predator, Symbol, and Divine Messenger

4 Perches 131

Bird of Paradox

5 Feather Straight Up 169

Native Peoples and the Spirit Bird

Part 3 New Science and New Attitudes

6 Eagledom 205

Pulling Back from Extinction-The First Time

7 Birds in a Band 246

Poison Rain, Blessed Relief

Part 4 Restoration

8 Eagle Lady 291

Persistence and Restoration

9 Bird on Top 330

New Century, New Age

Epilogue: Reconciliation 371

Acknowledgments 385

Notes 389

Index 410

About the Author 418