For centuries, Americans have celebrated the bald eagle as "majestic" and "noble," yet paradoxically attacked the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation's founding through the eagle's unprecedented, twenty-first-century resurgence, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when Indigenous peoples lived beside the bald eagle peacefully with that when Americans, first through hunting and then DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction. With spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, heroic bird rescuers, and bald eagles themselves, The Bald Eagle "deftly brings alive the bald eagle as a real animal, separate from both the myths of its rapaciousness and … symbolic majesty" (Matt Jaffe, San Francisco Chronicle).