Bald Eagle

The bald eagle is a large bird that lives in North America. It is a type of raptor, which means a bird that hunts other animals for food. The bald eagle has a dark brown body, a white head, a white tail, a big yellow beak, and sharp claws called talons. Its wings can stretch six to seven feet from tip to tip. An adult weighs between seven and fourteen pounds. Females are bigger than males.

Even though they are called "bald," these eagles are not bald. The word "bald" comes from an old English word that means "white-headed." Young bald eagles are all brown. They do not grow their white head and tail feathers until they are about five years old.

Bald eagles live near water. They are found along rivers, lakes, and coasts across the United States, Canada, and parts of Mexico. They almost always stay close to good fishing spots. Fish is their main food, but they also eat ducks, small animals, and animals that are already dead. Sometimes they even steal food from other birds, like ospreys. A bald eagle's eyesight is four to eight times sharper than a human's — sharp enough to spot a fish from a mile away.

Bald eagles pair up for life. Each year, a pair returns to the same nest and adds to it. A new nest is about six feet across. The biggest bald eagle nest ever found was in Florida. Built over many years, it grew to nearly ten feet wide and weighed more than two tons — as much as a small car.

Bald eagles almost went extinct in the 1960s. Farmers were spraying a chemical called DDT on their crops. The DDT got into the fish the eagles ate. It made their eggshells so thin that their eggs could not hatch. By 1963, only about 400 nesting pairs were left in the lower 48 states. Then the United States banned DDT in 1972 and passed laws to protect eagles. The eagles slowly came back. Today there are more than 300,000 of them in the United States.

The bald eagle is also the national bird of the United States. Congress chose it as a symbol of the country in 1782. The eagle appears on the dollar bill, the quarter, the Presidential seal, and on the badges of every branch of the military. Benjamin Franklin was not a fan. In a letter to his daughter, he called the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it steals food from other birds. He said the turkey would have been a better choice. Historians still argue about whether Franklin was serious or joking.