"totally unconcerned with how he appears to us"

"For my part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly...like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward...."

Was Franklin right? In part. The bald eagle is a thief, and he can be a coward. He will also eat carrion if it's handy, and he'll bully smaller birds. But all these negative words - "thief," "coward," "bully" - are human value judgements. What they really mean, in the case of the bald eagle, is that the bird is a opportunist, a bird perfectly capable (and splendidly designed) of taking prey ranging from fish to waterfowl to small mammals, but one that is not fussy about the source of a meal. If his food has already been killed for him, so much the better - this saves him some energy. If he spots a smaller bird like an osprey with a fish catch, he will unhesitatingly force the indignant fish hawk to drop it. Snatching up his ill-gotten gains in midair, the bald eagle then proceeds to a nearby perch, where he will eat the stolen meal entirely untroubled by conscience. The bald eagle is, quite simply, concerned with surviving. He is totally unconcerned with how he appears to us. The eagle, not the bald eagle but a generalized image of an eagle probably based on the golden eagle, has enjoyed a long history of use as a symbol of power in the Old World. More than 5,000 years ago, the Sumerian city of Lagash worshipped the bird as a divinity. In Roman mythology, Jupiter, king of the gods, was symbolized by an eagle clutching thunderbolts in its talons. Rome's famed legions marched with standards bearing the outline of an eagle. To lose one's eagle standard to the enemy was a disgrace, just as losing a flag would be today. Napoleon's troops rolled across Europe under a depiction of an eagle. German emperors adopted the eagle as a symbol of the imperial might, and the bird was used on the Russian and Austrian coats of arms. It may be this imperial tradition that made Charles Thompson choose the bald eagle, not the golden eagle, for the United States' national seal. The golden eagle is found in this country, so it qualifies as a native, but it's also found in the Old World, and depictions of it looked suspiciously like those old symbols of imperial power. Above all, the United States was to be a democracy, not an imperialist nation. The mistakes of the Old World were not to be repeated by the New.

…from: The Great Seal, Ben Franklin, and the Bald Eagle

[drawing by Doug Millison, inspired by an old Japanese or Chinese painting]