In the early 1960s, mother bald eagles across the United States were crushing their own eggs by sitting on them, in a continent-wide reproductive collapse caused by a single agricultural pesticide, and by 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of America’s national symbol remained alive in the lower 48 states

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The bald eagle had not always been a rare bird. When the United States adopted Haliaeetus leucocephalus as its national symbol on 20 June 1782, the species may have numbered as many as 100,000 nesting pairs across the continent, with substantial breeding populations in every state where suitable habitat existed. The bird was, by the [...] The post In the early 1960s, mother bald eagles across the United States were crushing their own eggs by sitting on them, in a continent-wide reproductive collapse caused by a single agricultural pesticide, and by 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of America’s national symbol remained alive in the lower 48 states appeared first on Space Daily .