Bald eagle

Bald eagles love to eat fish.

They swoop down and grab a fish from the water with their feet. Sometimes they take food from other birds!

Fish are the bald eagle's favorite food, such as salmon, herring and catfish. An eagle swoops low over the water and snatches a fish with its sharp claws, called talons. It also eats birds, rabbits, muskrats, crabs and dead animals.

Bald eagles are famous food thieves. A bald eagle will chase an osprey until the smaller bird drops its fish, then grab it in midair. That habit made Benjamin Franklin grumble that the bald eagle was a poor choice for a national symbol.

The diet centers on fish such as salmon, herring, shad and catfish, but bald eagles are opportunists that also take birds, reptiles, amphibians, crabs and mammals such as rabbits and muskrats, alive or as carrion. They can gorge on a large meal and digest it over several days, and survive fasts of days or even weeks.

Kleptoparasitism, stealing food, is common: bald eagles harass ospreys, other eagles and even otters until they drop their catch. Cornell also notes occasional cooperative hunting, with one eagle flushing prey toward another.

Bald eagles do a sky dance.

Two eagles hold feet high in the air and tumble down together. Then they let go and fly away.

Bald eagles have spectacular courtship displays. In one, a male and female fly high, lock their talons together and cartwheel toward the ground, letting go at the last moment.

Most of the year bald eagles live alone or in pairs, but in winter they can gather by the hundreds where there is open water and plenty of fish. These crowds are noisy, with birds jostling and squabbling over food. Bald eagles have even been seen playing, passing sticks to each other in midair.

Courtship includes the cartwheel display, in which a pair locks talons high in the air and tumbles downward, separating just before the ground. Pairs defend breeding territories against raptors, ravens, coyotes and foxes.

Outside the breeding season eagles congregate by the scores or hundreds at communal roosts and feeding sites, where they bicker and jostle over prey. Cornell reports apparent play, including one observation of six eagles passing sticks to each other in flight. Smaller birds, from crows to flycatchers, often mob eagles that come too close.

Long ago, bald eagles became rare.

People made new laws to protect them. A harmful chemical called DDT was stopped. Now there are lots of bald eagles again!

By the mid-1900s bald eagles had become rare. People trapped, shot and poisoned them, and a pesticide called DDT made their eggshells so weak that many chicks never hatched.

Then people acted. The bird was protected, DDT was banned, and eagle numbers soared. In 2007 the bald eagle was taken off the United States endangered species list. It still faces dangers today, such as lead poisoning from bullet fragments in the animals it eats, crashes with vehicles and loss of shoreline habitat.

Once abundant, bald eagles declined through trapping, shooting, poisoning and reproductive failure caused by pesticides, chiefly DDT. The species was listed under the US Endangered Species Act by 1978; protection and the DDT ban brought a dramatic resurgence, with numbers rising nearly 4 percent a year between 1966 and 2019 according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

It was delisted in June 2007, and the IUCN rates it Least Concern. In 2021 the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated more than 316,000 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Remaining threats include lead from ammunition in scavenged prey, collisions and shoreline development, and oil pollution: the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill killed an estimated 247 eagles.