Review: 'The Bald Eagle,' by Jack E. Davis

Today the soaring bald eagle, wings expanded, white head gleaming, is a frequent sight along America's lakes, streams and beaches. The eagle's skill in hunting, its fidelity to its mate and its devotion to its offspring make it seem truly America's bird, the apotheosis of the values we cherish.

And it is American, in more ways than one. Our national bird was almost destroyed by the same lust for land and wealth that conquered the country. And it was saved by the same determination and idealism that drive the most far-seeing of America's visionaries.

This is the story that historian Jack E. Davis tells in "The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird," and he tells it well. Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for "The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea," Davis synthesizes politics, culture and natural history to tell the eagle's tale.

"Americans forced the bald eagle to exist in virtual parallel universes," he writes. "In one, it was a heart-beating species: chick, juvenile, parent — a dynamic of nature. In another, it was symbol, metaphor, icon, avatar. ... In one universe people hunted it down; in the other, the Americanization of popular culture raised it up."

The eagle was adopted as the national symbol in the late 1700s, and artists drew from European heraldic design to emblazon its image on America's great seal. Humans, as they do, anthropomorphized the eagle, and not everyone was a fan: Referring to its skill at robbing other birds of fish, Ben Franklin labeled the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" who "does not get his living honestly."

Artist John James Audubon branded the eagle a thief, and shot, roped, clubbed and even poisoned eagles in his hunt for specimens for his work.

Eagles were legion in Audubon's day, but as America's population swelled and moved west, it began to suffer. While Native Americans had coexisted with eagles for eons, white settlers destroyed their habitat and shot them as predatory pests.

Eagles became prey for bounty hunters — before its bounty ended in the 1950s, the state of Alaska made 128,273 separate payments for killing eagles, and popular culture and journalism stoked anti-eagle animus by portraying eagles as baby-snatchers.

The burgeoning conservation movement helped end the slaughter, but guns and bounties weren't what almost wiped the eagle from the national landscape. DDT, a pesticide widely used after World War II, thinned the shells of bird eggs so that eaglets failed to hatch. Its numbers dwindled or died out in most states. The latter part of the book, in which activists successfully lobbied for a DDT ban while scientists and conservationists reintroduced eagles in almost every state, is a shining example of how sustained political action can make a difference.

Davis is a superb natural historian with a lyrical feel for the eagle's world — its quirks, its habits and its extraordinary survival skills. He sketches vivid portraits of the artists, scientists and eagle-loving eccentrics who thought nothing of perching in a tree for weeks to document eagle life. These character sketches do overstuff the narrative, which might have been better served by focusing on fewer outsized personalities. Still, this is an extraordinary and fundamentally optimistic story, and it sends a message we need to hear, as we face the formidable environmental challenges of the 21^st century.

Mary Ann Gwinn is a Seattle-based book critic.

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

By: Jack E. Davis.

Publisher: W.W. Norton, 464 pages, $29.95.