On July 12, 1995, the once-critically-endangered bald eagle had recovered enough for its protected status to be downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened,” offering hope for the survival of what’s arguably America’s most symbolic animal.
The bald eagle’s spectacular recovery was the result of two main things, a government agency and a law—specifically, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which banned certain pesticides, and the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which protected eagle nesting habitat.
The origins of the bald eagle—that mighty bird of prey with its piercing yellow eyes, pristine white head, majestic wings, and clutching talons—as the national symbol of the United States date back to the origins of the nation itself.
When General George Washington and allied American and French forces defeated the British at Yorktown—now part of Virginia’s Colonial National Historical Park—in 1781, the Revolutionary War was effectively over and the young United States had to get its act together.
Among other things, it needed a constitution and a currency. It also needed an identity of its own—emblems, symbols, seals.
Indeed, one of the first things the Continental Congress did was designing an official seal. After several tweaks and adjustments, it formally adopted the Great Seal of the United States on June 20, 1782, featuring a bald eagle holding an olive branch and arrows.
The seal also included the thirteen-lettered—one for every original colony—phrase “E pluribus unum,” Latin for “Out of many, one.”
It was added to flags, official government paperwork, buildings, and eventually to the nation’s currency. Within mere years, the bald eagle became the embodiment of the United States itself.
At the time, in the late 18th century, there were an estimated 100,000 nesting bald eagles in the country (though these numbers are anecdotal and can’t be verified).
However, with the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution, the species’ population began to dwindle dramatically starting in the late 1800s. Major contributors to the decline of the bald eagle were nesting habitat destruction and hunting.
By the 1930s, the bald eagle—America’s national symbol—was seriously threatened.
Congress noticed and passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act in 1940, which made it illegal to kill, possess, or sell the animals. (An amendment in 1962 expanded the law to the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which is still in effect today.)
Another massive threat was approaching, though: the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT.
Having become ubiquitous after World War II, DDT—which didn’t directly kill the birds but made their eggshells so fragile they often cracked during incubation—wrought absolute havoc on the remaining bald eagle population. It collapsed.
“In some areas, entire generations failed to hatch,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) says. “This was more than a conservation crisis, it was a failure of our identity as a nation.”
By the early 1960s, there were only 417 known nesting pair in the entire lower 48 states. The bald eagle faced extinction.
Then, Rachel Carson published her groundbreaking and eye-opening book Silent Spring in 1962, the result of four years of intensive research on the effect synthetic pesticides have on birds of prey.
Carson had collected tons of information at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, which was established in 1934 by Rosalie Edge, the “hellcat” of conservation and one of America’s greatest, most fascinating—yet, somehow, also least known—conservationists. I wrote an entire piece about this amazing woman here.
Seven years after Carson’s book was published, in January 1969, an offshore oil rig blowout in California spilled four million gallons of crude oil into U.S. waters, covering many miles of Santa Barbara beaches and coating thousands of birds. It was the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history at the time.
Then, in June of that same year, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, arguably the epitome of unrestricted industrial pollution at the time, caught fire once again. It had done so ten times before, but this time, the country—and the world—took notice.
A Time Magazine article described the Cuyahoga River as a river that “oozes rather than flows” where someone “does not drown but decay.” The story quickly spread to other publications, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Half a year earlier, on Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders had taken the first color photo of Earth from space during the first crewed voyage that orbited the moon.
Known as “Earthrise,” the iconic image was instrumental in raising public awareness on the finite resources of Planet Earth and has rightly been called “the most influential environmental photo ever taken.”
Take all of those 1960s events together—bird-killing pesticides, a photo showing the insignificance of Earth in the vastness of space, shorebirds coated in crude oil, and burning rivers—and it makes it easier to understand why the 1970s became the “environmental decade.”
The first major development followed soon.
On July 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon sent a special message to the U.S. Congress, announcing his administration’s federal government reorganization plans.
“As concern with the condition of our physical environment has intensified, it has become increasingly clear that we need to know more about the total environment—land, water, and air,” he said. “It also has become increasingly clear that only by reorganizing our Federal efforts can we develop that knowledge, and effectively ensure the protection, development and enhancement of the total environment itself.”
The result was the brand-new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Just two years later, the EPA took the historic measure to ban DDT and a number of similar pesticides.
Then, in 1973, Congress passed what could be considered the most consequential wildlife protection law in history: the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It did so with overwhelming bipartisan support. The House voted 355-4 in favor, while the Senate approved it unanimously.
“One of the first animals placed on the endangered list was the American bald eagle—the national symbol selected by the Continental Congress in 1782,” says the History, Art & Archives website of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 1978, the bald eagle was listed as endangered throughout the continental United States, except for Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin, where the species was classified as threatened.
Thanks to both the banning of DDT and the habitat protections provided by the Endangered Species Act, the population of bald eagles started rebounding almost right away.
On July 12, 1995, the bald eagle had made such a spectacular comeback that its status was downgraded from endangered to threatened under the ESA.
Then, finally, in 2007, bald eagles were removed from the endangered species list entirely, marking, in the words of the USWFS, “one of the greatest wildlife recoveries in American history.”
The latest population report estimates that there are currently 316,700 individual bald eagles and 71,400 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states.
I’d like to reiterate here that without the strict protections for bald eagle habitat under the Endangered Species Act, and without bans on certain pesticides, it’s entirely possible that there would not be any wild bald eagles in the continental United States today.
On July 10, 2026, the Trump administration, however, announced it has shrunk the meaning of “harm” under the ESA so that it includes only the direct killing or injuring of fish and wildlife. It no longer includes the destruction of their habitats.
In other words, the administration now says that destroying threatened or endangered species habitat is “harmless” to the animals concerned. That’s beyond outrageous.
This opens the door for all kinds of destructive activities like drilling, logging, and mining to occur in crucial wildlife habitat. That includes the very habitat that was so essential to save the bald eagle from extinction.
In the 1970s, the Republican Nixon administration—Nixon!—reorganized the federal government and passed laws to save America’s disappearing wildlife and deteriorating environment.
The spectacular recovery of the bald eagle, the most iconic symbol of the United States, is the flagship example of the success of the actions they took half a century ago.
In the 2020s, however, the Republican Trump administration is doing everything it can to reverse that success.
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram
Image 1: Bald eagle, credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Image 2: Early sketch of the Great Seal by Charles Thompson, credit: National Archives
Image 3: “Earthrise” by William Anders, credit: NASA
Image 4: Bald eagle nest, credit: Tom Koerner / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The most effective way to wipe out a living, regenerating species is to destroy it's life supporting habitat. The MAGA Plan is basically supporting the industrial destruction of life on Earth with the horrific lack of understanding of or respect for the unity and diversity of biological interdependence and healthy balance. We have to undo everything that the current felon USA President and his administration has signed US up for and restore the wildlife protections that have been so successful in the past. We fought for and won those protections in the 1970's and the success of that legislation would secure the continuation of the policies in a sane government.