Meet the bald eagle, the national symbol of the United States since 1782. It is found throughout North America. A grown-up bald eagle has a white head and tail and a brown body. The word bald in the name probably comes from an old English word, balde, that meant white. Young bald eagles are mostly brown, and they get their white head and tail when they are about four or five years old.
A bald eagle's body is about 28 to 38 inches long, and female eagles are larger than males. A big female can weigh as much as 14 pounds, or about 6.5 kilograms, and her wings can spread up to 8 feet, or 2.4 meters, across.
A hungry bald eagle waits on a favorite perch until it sees a fish near the surface of the water, and it also hunts by flying low over water or land. A bald eagle sees at least four times better than a person. It grabs fish with the sharp talons on its toes, and it is reported to dive at speeds up to about 100 miles per hour, or 160 kilometers per hour.
Fish is the bald eagle's favorite food. It takes fish from near the surface and does not dive under the water. It also eats ducks and small animals such as rabbits.
Eagle nests are usually in tall trees, but they have also been found on cliffs, on the ground and on towers and power poles. A bald eagle pair builds its nest over one to three months before the eggs are laid. The nest is made of large sticks, and the pair comes back to the same nest year after year and adds more sticks, twigs and grass.
A pair most often lays two eggs, and sometimes one or three, and both parents take turns keeping the eggs warm. The eggs hatch after about 35 days. Eaglets are light gray when they hatch and turn brown later, and they stay in the nest for 10 to 12 weeks. Young bald eagles usually settle to nest within about 100 miles of where they hatched.
Bald eagles that nest in the north generally fly south in winter, to open water. In winter many bald eagles gather near rivers where salmon come to spawn, and when they are not nesting, they often rest together at shared roosts.
The insecticide DDT got into fish, and eagles that ate them laid eggs with shells too thin to last. In 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles were known in the lower 48 states. The United States banned DDT for most uses in 1972.
Bald eagles were removed from the federal endangered species list in 2007. As of November 2026, an estimate from 2018 and 2019 data puts the bald eagle population in the lower 48 states at about 316,700 birds.
Words to know
- insecticide: bug poison
- roosts: resting places
- symbol: a sign
- endangered: in danger
- spawn: lay eggs
