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A Natural (and Political and Cultural) History of America’s Bird

The bird’s-eye view in Castle Dale, Utah.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

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THE BALD EAGLE
The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird
By Jack E. Davis

Having written about elephants in Burma during World War II, I get a particular thrill when readers tell me they picked up my book for the history but fell in love with the elephants. As an animal writer, I had that experience in reverse with Jack E. Davis’s “The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird”: Who knew the powdered wig set could be so interesting?

OK — I’m half joking, and in any case I’m referring only to an opening section in which members of the Continental Congress contemplated, among other things, the bald eagle and the Great Seal of the United States. But Davis, the Pulitzer-winning author of “The Gulf,” makes clear in his rollicking, poetic, wise new book that cultural and political history are an integral part of this natural history, not to be omitted if we want to tell the whole story.

His frame is wide, taking in Benjamin Franklin (not a fan of the bald eagle), Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon (who slaughtered and shot his way through studying and painting them), Native Americans who see the bald eagle as a spiritual bird, the environmental hero Rachel Carson, President Nixon (who created the Environmental Protection Agency, “the beginning of the end of DDT”), Dolly Parton (eagle hospital funder) and Andy Warhol, among others.

Along with the famous humans, Davis never neglects the birds themselves. He writes of their long-term bonds, their massive nests, “as stout as an old warship,” to which they return year after year, and of their eclectic appetites: “Seizing prey from land, water and sky, balds are the rare airborne species that feeds at all three tables.” Their courtship is spectacular, with couples “barrel-rolling and scissoring their flight paths, or with one flying upside down beneath the other.” And it’s not all sexy stunts. Mates defend each other and work together. Davis even makes the case, using the latest neuroscience, that we could call their bond love.

The fortunes of our (unofficial) national bird fluctuated. Exclusive to North America, bald eagles made fierce, handsome symbols for a new country, yet as actual birds they were often despised as thieves. They can, in fact, be talented kleptoparasites, stealing fish from others, though scientists now consider this a sign of intelligence, not moral corruption. The once widespread notion that they could snatch human children — dramatized in the 1908 silent film “Rescued From an Eagle’s Nest” — was false. Still, as predators, they were shot, poisoned and strangled by the thousands. They suffered habitat loss. The Bald Eagle Protection Act in 1940, and the banning of DDT in the early 1970s, were vital.

Among the army of eagle champions Davis details, my favorites are the quirkier unknowns: people like Doris Mager, who took a motion sickness pill before ascending to an unoccupied Florida eagle nest in 1979 for what was labeled not a sit-in but a weeklong “nest-in.” She raised awareness of the bald eagle’s population in decline — by that point, the birds were endangered in most states.

Davis also gives due credit to the ornithologists and biologists who boosted egg production, with helpful chickens conscripted to incubate extra bald eagle clutches, and super glue to patch cracked shells when every egg counted. Young healthy eagles were flown and driven cross-country to repopulate habitat.

By the 1980s, “hack towers,” or artificial nesting towers, in which unseen human caretakers hand-reared the birds, were in full swing. The eaglets raised in these programs did their best, providing Davis with up-close dramas of little eagles growing up “using their wings like crutches” to move around, while their large feet flop “out in front of them like clown shoes.” One eaglet, No. 60, who failed a first attempt at flight, crash-landed and had to trudge back on the ground to the home tower, “head down.”

Davis shines at most everything in this exuberantly expansive book, but especially at highlighting individual birds like the translocated ones making their way in the world. With eagle numbers now estimated at levels they were before “America became America,” their comeback is astonishing.

Vicki Constantine Croke is the author of “Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II.”

THE BALD EAGLE
The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird
By Jack E. Davis
Illustrated. 417 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: High Fliers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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