Is America better off now that we have an official national bird?

I’ve always thought it was the national bird. <shrug>

The turkey was such a better choice!

Bald Eagles are better off as there is less chance of them going extinct.

Couldn’t be bothered to override the unelected parliamentarian’s recommendation to get everyone $15 minimum wage when he had the chance though, or to let there be a robust primary so the best candidate could run against Trump.

Bald eagles are cool though. I see them occasionally where I live.

Should have been the vulture.

@ragingloli Good choice of a National Bird. Ecosystems that have vultures benefit greatly by having these sanitary engineers clean up the environment. Vultures have the ability to digest and process bubonic plague, rabies, distemper, anthrax and most other disease microbes.

Vultures have the ability (huge strong body, strong talons and sharp powerful beaks) to kill smaller animals for food but they don’t. Why? Because they don’t have to. Animals die naturally on their own.

Like the USA, vultures do a lot of clean up in the world. And each get a bum rap for the good that they do.

Bald Eagles, were a type of vulture. They evolved into a predator, over time.
THAT is why the “Bald” Eagle is “bald.”
The while feathers on the birds head are new to the design.
They used to have feather-less heads and necks, like modern vultures, for pushing their heads into corpses to reach the leftovers.

^^^Bald Eagles are named from the old English word, “balde” which means white.
Bald Eagles was true predators. They will attack many different species of small animals for food. I’ve seen them attack and kill small ducks and coots and fish. Heard stories of Bald Eagles carrying off domestic cats.

It’s fair to point out that as of January 20, we will have a birdbrain in the White House.

@gondwanalon Yeah I knew someone who said she saw a small pet dog get carried away by a Bald Eagle at a park in Seattle.

The Bald Eagle is a “type of sea Eagle, which split from African vulture lineage several million years ago…

Predator now…Formerly a scavenger.

They are certainly big, and strong.

Remember, that before they were vultures, they were at one point dinosaurs.

Even humans, were once a small rodent…

@MrGrimm888 If you go back far enough in time then our ancestors were also scavengers. In the Pre-Cambrian Period the first life forms evolved. Those single celled organisms were also our ancestors. They lived and scavenged for nearly a billion years until some evolved to become multicellular organisms.

The small mammal that eventually evolved to give rise to all mammals (including us) was more shrew-like (insectivor-like) and lived 225 million years ago. See here: https://www.sci.news/paleontology/brasilodon-earliest-mammal-11171.html

“What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?”
-Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”