On account of the bald eagle’s laziness, Benjamin Franklin was averse to its designation as America's national bird. He wrote:
You may have seen him [the eagle] perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.
Franklin went so far as to say the bald eagle “is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly. . . Besides, he is a rank coward.”
Benjamin Franklin—imperfect as he was—was right about many things. His skepticism of eagles was one of them. We don’t usually see eagles described as “lazy,” or spoken of in ways that aren’t laudatory or fawning. More often, they elicit from observers words like “majestic,” “patriotic,” or “noble.”
But Franklin’s observations, as noted by Peter Matthiessen in Wildlife in America, are “pertinent enough. Our national symbol, sad to say, subsists largely on carrion.” The osprey, by comparison—Franklin’s “Fishing Hawk”—wouldn’t deign to eat carrion. “Comparing Ospreys to eagles,” Alan F. Poole writes in Ospreys: The Revival of a Global Raptor, “Osprey biologists like to joke that no self-respecting Osprey would ever look at carrion unless it were starving—and that’s true.”
Eagles seem less majestic when we picture them gorging on roadkill alongside the highway, waiting for a hard-working osprey to fly by with a fish.
It is undeniable, however, that eagles have a hold on us. There’s an aura of fierce magnificence about them that doesn’t seem to wane. Despite Franklin’s apprehensions, despite the eagle’s kleptoparasitic and scavenging tendencies, Matthiessen goes on to praise our national bird the way we’re accustomed to hearing:
White-headed and austere on a solitary tree, or flapping and sailing, stiff-winged and spread-fingered, over southern waterways or northern river deltas, inland river swamps or outer beaches, coursing the nation in summer and winter from the Columbia to the Merrimack, from the Everglades to the Yukon, the bald eagle is magnificent.
I have been fortunate to see many eagles. I’ve seen them in the town where I grew up, in New England; I’ve seen them in Alaska; I’ve seen them in between. It is, without fail, striking how large they are. You cannot help but gasp.
Recently, a fellow birdwatcher and I met before sunrise beside a river to look for eagles. We decided to drive to another location after seeing nothing but cormorants and sparrows. As we made our departure, a bald eagle flew right overhead, away from us, following the river inland. We did not get a great look at the bird through the windshield, but there was no question what it was. It was close enough that its mass was unmistakable—like some dark mahogany beam fell from heaven’s ceiling, and, in the process, became animated with the gift of flight.
Repeated gasps aside, I’ve recently found myself underwhelmed by eagles. I’ve found them, dare I say, boring.
Upon rereading that sentence, I chafe at that word: “boring.” It feels dishonest. Eagles aren’t boring—far from it. But they tend to bore me in the abstract, in theory. All boredom washes away when I actually see one, but this “boredom” might be worth interrogating:
Eagles bore me in the sense that the objectively awesome is boring. They bore me in the way the word “awesome” is itself boring: bastardized by overuse, cheapened—despite being tailor-made to describe things which inspire awe. Things like eagles.
I recall a conversation with a friend in which it was determined that a certain actor was so good-looking he was boring to look at. Eagles are boring that same way. (It is however worth noting that boringly handsome actors are still in fact handsome. Likewise, I still gasp when I see eagles.)
Eagles are boring how the Beatles are boring; how the Empire State Building is boring. Everybody already knows the Beatles are good; the Empire State Building is, as advertised, quite tall. You know what you’re in for.
Maybe a better word is obvious, or predictable. Eagles are obvious.
One December morning, I was driving to meet the same birder from my earlier anecdote. She texted me: There’s a bald eagle on a telephone pole near the bridge. I’m stopped to look at it.
I met her at the bridge. Even from far-off down the road, the eagle was unmistakable, obvious. I got out of my truck to take some pictures. It was a bleak morning, the light was poor. The eagle sat like a sentinel, turning its head intermittently.
As people saw the two of us standing at the guardrail, more cars pulled over to look at the bird. Vehicles jerked into park, necks craned, shutters clicked. More cars slowed to see what all the fuss was about. A small crowd convened.
All for what? An eagle perched by a bridge, sitting there, doing nothing. It sounds kind of boring when put that way; but I still stopped—others still stopped. I still felt compelled, despite less than ideal conditions, to take the bird’s picture. I still, when recounting the events of that day, excitedly remember seeing that eagle. Predictable and obvious, perched idly—it was still an eagle.
Out of boredom, I googled “eagles are boring” in hopes of finding some insight into my feelings. All of the results were either about the football team or the band. Of course they were—real live bald eagles aren’t boring! I was being absurd.
One headline stuck out: “Boring? Predictable? Eagles on track by sticking to the blueprint.” Still about football—but that one struck a chord.
Maybe eagles are too predictable? Their blueprint is simple: be a bald eagle—huge, imposing, distinct. Objectively and predictably magnificent. It works for them. As evidenced by my previous anecdote, they don’t even need to do anything to draw a crowd.
Perhaps the self-evident majesty of the eagle is an inquiry inhibitor: because the bird is so grand, so large and beautiful, we do not look any further than that. Why would we? We feel we know all we need to know about the bird just by looking at it. This is not true. There is always more to know. To return to an earlier comparison: an objectively handsome actor might be “boring” to look at, but the issue is that we limit ourselves to looking and judging on appearance. There is more to know about a person or a thing. I think eagles fall victim to this as well. Ask somebody what they know about eagles, and they’ll probably reply with a remark about what they look like, how big they are, or about how, to Ben Franklin’s chagrin, the bald eagle is the United States’ national bird. For a bird we all know, we don’t know them very well.
As far as my own boredom goes, the blame falls on my shoulders. I simply have not taken the time to get to know eagles to the extent I’ve taken time to know other birds. I’ve stopped at a very basic understanding. To most people, an eagle is a symbol more than it is a bird. This, I think, is what I’ve been hung up on. I’ve neglected to push past my understanding of the eagle as a symbol—that which graces sports jerseys and national seals—to cultivate a more meaningful understanding of the eagle as an actual bird. I am of the mind that there is no room for boredom with regard to what is around you—birds, animals, whatever else. What I hold true in my head, in this case, I have failed to put into practice.
It is also worth noting the risks of elevating things to symbolic status. When we treat things as larger than life, we often dilute or misrepresent reality. Recently, somebody remarked to me that bald eagles look “fake.” In a sense, they are fake. Our cultural understanding of eagles is fake—it is not scientific or factual. We understand them as symbols, not as birds. I recognize now that I am bored with the eagle as a symbol; I am not bored of the eagle as a bird. This is a liberating realization, and explains why I am only bored of eagles in the abstract. Once an eagle appears in reality, I gasp—I pull over excitedly.
I am bored of what we think eagles are; I am excited by what they actually are: beautiful, imperfect, scavenging fish-thieves—soaring “stiff-winged and spread-fingered” on impossibly large wings.
To circle back to Benjamin’s Franklin’s skepticism of eagles, he was not right in calling the bird a “rank coward,” but in taking the time to observe the bird, to learn that it’s more than just a large, beautiful raptor. He did not want the eagle to become a symbol of his country because he was familiar with the bird’s reality. Now, centuries later, most of us are familiar only with the symbol.
Some difficulty arises because eagles do look like they would embody all that we think they do. This is not to say that watching an eagle steal a fish from another bird isn’t awe-inspiring, but it’s not quite the kind of behavior most people attribute to the eagle as a symbol. Our understanding of eagles has become—like the word “awesome”—bastardized. It’s okay to select an eagle as a team mascot. It’s also important to recognize that eagles eat carrion, and that the sound most people think eagles make is probably that of a red-tailed hawk. This is a flagrant example of our cultural misunderstanding of eagles. The bald eagle, as noted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “emits surprisingly weak-sounding calls—usually a series of high-pitched whistling or piping notes.” The screech we erroneously attribute to eagles shows the extent to which they’ve been misrepresented since becoming more symbol than bird.
Sometimes, when I listen to eagle calls, I am reminded of gulls. This strikes me as a somewhat fitting comparison. I once found gulls boring; it wasn’t until I started learning the names and habits of different gulls—herring gulls, ring-billed gulls, Bonaparte’s gulls, laughing gulls, great black-backed gulls—that I realized gulls are far more interesting than their cultural identity as nuisance squawkers that steal your beach snacks. Likewise, eagles are far more interesting than their cultural identity as an unassailable symbol of magnificence and patriotism.
In this sense, eagles are illustrative of a larger phenomenon. We are often bored by that which we do not completely understand, or by that which we misunderstand. The antidote to boredom is to seek the truth, to get to know things beyond what is obvious or predictable about them—beyond what we’ve been told, what we take for granted as truth.