Here are some fun facts about eagles for Reece:
1) Bald eagles sound a lot less majestic than you might think. Because the bald eagle is the national bird of the USA, video editors sometimes go to extra lengths to make them seem especially mighty. When you think of how a bald eagle sounds, more likely than not, this is the kind of sound you imagine.

However, as you might have noticed, this is not a bald eagle - this is actually the cry of a red-tailed hawk.

According to Connie Stranger, a bird expert who was interviewed by NPR, there is an obvious aesthetic reason why our national bird often has its call replaced. Here is what bald eagles actually sound like.

You can read more Connie Stranger's analysis in NPRs short write up here.

2) While eagles are incredible birds of prey (harpy eagle talons are roughly the size of a human finger and are razor sharp; image here; sometimes they get their food through sneakier means. Some eagles are kleptoparasitic, meaning that they are not shy about stealing food from other predators!

3) Bald eagles were once endangered because of the use of DDT as a pesticide across the United States, which poisoned their fish. Thankfully, because of the Endangered Species Act, their populations have risen and our now ( stable. ) In fact, they are now so abundant that some Alaskan residents find them to be a bit of a nuisance (the way that pigeons are frequently thought of by city dwellers). Here you can find a video of several bald eagles scavenging off of the back of a pickup truck.

These stories show how interconnected we are with even solitary, iconic predators like eagles, and how our decisions can impact them. Like a lot of animals (including mice, rats, and raccoons), eagles adapt their behaviors as humans continue to move into and alter their habitats. These behaviors, while not technically "natural", are still fascinating and can tell us a lot about the animal and the strategies it uses to survive.

It's pretty amazing what you can learn about living creatures when you really dive deep into it. I'm glad you are interested in eagles. I'm guessing you're focusing on the bald eagle (instead of the golden). I'm not an ornithologist (avian scientist), but I like to watch eagles, hawks, falcons and owls and do have a few funny facts and observations.

I could be mistaken (I'm sure you can confirm with an internet search), but I think the American Bald Eagle holds a record for "largest nest." I've seen in person how large some of these nests can get. A pair of eagles near our family farm in the midwest has been nesting in the same spot for 20+ years (in a huge old oak) and that nest is getting really large, despite bad weather! I of course have not measured it, but I estimate it is greater than 6 feet in diameter.

Another fun fact is that bald eagles are notorious for stealing from other birds, even younger eagles. The term for this is "kleptoparasitic." On a backpacking trip, I once saw a bald eagle fight a large osprey time and again over freshly caught fish. The eagle lazily watched the osprey hunt, then attacked her as soon as she was successful - the eagle won about 75% of the time. That poor osprey did all of the hard work!

Apparently this stealing behavior is what Ben Franklin detested about naming the Bald Eagle as the national bird, but it's hard to separate myth from fact on that (he wanted the wild turkey as the national bird).

I also get a chuckle out of watching tiny birds "gang up" on eagles and hawks - chasing them away, usually, from nesting areas. Crows do that, too, but somehow it's different when the little ones clearly have "had enough of it."

You might also be interested in watching live stream videos of birds such as eagles. You can find links and a lot more facts on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website.

I don't know whether this fact about eagles is "funny," or just plain cool, but here goes.

Most people don't know that eagles, along with all their fine-feathered cousins (usually known as birds), are also actually dinosaurs. Again, most people who aren't paleontologists think that dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago. Well, until about 20 years ago, we started discovering many, many feathered transitional forms that are half bird-like and half meat-eating dinosaur-like (a group called theropods). This doesn't just prove that birds and theropods are close evolutionary cousins, but that birds ARE theropods, and theropods ARE in turn dinosaurs. Therefore, eagles are a special kind of dinosaur in exactly the same way that Basset Hounds are a special kind of dog.

I hope you agree that this is a surprising fact about eagles!

This site has some interesting information. It says that bald eagles have the largest tree nests of any birds.

When I was young —this was a while ago—it looked like bald eagles would go extinct. A scientist name Rachel Carson wrote a book called “Silent Spring”, about how pesticides were making bird eggs so weak, that they would crack before the chicks could develop. Laws were passed to protect birds. I have now seen many of them in the wild.

When I was in Tanzania in Africa, I got to see African Fish Eagles. They look a lot like bald eagles.

Bald eagles only get the “bald” or white head when they are mature. Before that, they’re all brown. Why do you think they develop a signal that says they’re adults?

1. The eagle is not a phylogenetic clade. All animals in a clade are evolutionarily related to each other. As a result, all birds of prey that can hunt large enough are eagles.

2. Most eagles species are located in Eurasia and Africa. There are only two native species in North America. One of them is the bald eagle.

3. The bald eagle is not actually bald like the vultures. In older English, bald means white headed.

4. Female bald eagles are 25% larger than their male counterparts.

5. Both the mother and the father sit on the eggs. Although mother does most of the incubation.

6. Baby bald eagles fledge between 8 to 14 weeks. Before that, they only have down feathers. They are really fluffy.

7. The bald eagle looks extremely silly front-on.

When an airplane ride suddenly gets bumpy, turbulence is usually the reason why. Turbulence is a chaotic change in air pressure and flow that usually means that airflight becomes harder and bumpier. This means one would expect that eagles would have a hard time dealing with turbulence in the air while flying, right? Well according to recent research by scientists in the past couple years, this turbulence can actually be used by eagles as a source of energy to improve their flight. Scientists in Cornell fitted a GPS tracker backpack to a golden eagle flying around in Alabama and got over 200 hours data like location, altitude, speed, and acceleration from the eagle. They saw that the eagle's acceleration behavior was very similar to that of the turbulence in the air, showing that the eagle was flying in harmony with turbulence, rather than having to fight it. So the next time you fly in an airplane and the ride gets bumpy because of turbulence, think about how cool it would be if in the future, our airplanes flew like eagles, and could instead fly more smoothly in turbulence rather than bumpily!

Source for more info: here.

I have a pretty funny fact. The call that we hear when we think of the bald eagle as our American symbol is not truly an eagle's sound. It is the call of a red tailed hawk. The bald eagle call is a cackling laugh.

Eagles are large hawks. There are a couple of different groups of eagles, all of them hawks, but not all closely related to other eagles. In particular, the American bald eagle, the United States' national bird, is not closely related to the golden eagle, the other common eagle in North America.

This site has interesting information. Here are some of the 10 Fascinating Facts About Bald Eagles

Hi Reece! Thanks for your good question! I give you a list of scientific facts!