Canada supplied juvenile eagles for US bald eagle restoration

White House eagle-goose post drew millions amid trade tensions

In late August, the White House posted a photograph on social media of a bald eagle standing atop the limp neck of a Canada goose and pressing the goose’s face into grey winter slush. The image drew millions of views as trade talks between the United States and Canada failed and tensions between the countries rose.

Experts said Canada played a critical role in restoring a bird that had come close to disappearing from much of the United States. Canadian efforts included flying juvenile eagles south for release into US skies.

A media report in 1983 profiled Operation Eaglet, which used cars, float planes and biologists to help restore US populations. A CBC reporter described the project as a “courtesy of Canadian goodwill.” In one operation, a team collected eight baby eagles in northern Manitoba, where experts believed roughly 3,000 birds remained. The team sent one eagle to Pennsylvania, one to New Jersey and six to Massachusetts.

Project leader Jack Swedberg told the CBC that the Massachusetts birds would “make a tremendous difference” because “currently we don’t have any.” The project used a technique called “hacking,” in which eaglets were raised in controlled environments and kept out of sight of people to prevent them from imprinting on humans or associating caregivers with food.

Over the years, Pennsylvania received 88 eagles from Saskatchewan. The state now has 300 breeding pairs. US restoration efforts also sourced eagles from British Columbia and Nova Scotia, including 36 from Cape Breton that went to New Jersey and Massachusetts.

New York faced a legal obstacle to obtaining Canadian birds. The state had only one breeding pair by the 1970s, and Derek Stoll later captured the eagle-goose photograph there.

“You’re not allowed to import bald eagles. So there was a population in Canada, but we are not allowed to bring bald eagles into the United States,” Darryl McGrath, the Albany-based author of Flight Paths, said during a 2016 lecture. “So we couldn’t get the eagle chicks for this hacking project – we couldn’t get them from Canada, even though Canada was very willing to help us out.”

New York instead obtained eagles from other states, including Alaska, until laws governing the transport of endangered species were amended.

The restoration followed a steep population decline. As many as half a million bald eagles lived in North America before European settlement, generally near large bodies of open water where they fed on fish and nested in tall trees. The bird appeared on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782 and became the country’s national bird in 2024. The word “bald” derives from the Middle English words “balde” or “balled,” referring to a white blaze rather than an absence of feathers.

A photograph accompanying the reporting showed a couple wearing patriotic jackets bearing images of bald eagles. Another showed a bald eagle from the American Eagle Foundation entertaining fans before a Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles game in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As settlements expanded, people killed eagles based on beliefs about their effect on food and livestock. “Bald eagles were seen by some as competitors for fish resources and a threat to their livestock and wild game by others,” said David Bird, a professor emeritus of wildlife biology at McGill University in Montreal. “None of those things turned out to be true in the end.”

Officials first offered 50 cents for a pair of eagle feet and increased the bounty to $2 by 1949. More than 100,000 bald eagles were killed through the program before it ended in 1953.

DDT compounded the population pressure. The chemical was first produced on a large scale to combat malaria and was widely used after the Second World War to control pests. It accumulated in animal fat, particularly among predators at the top of the food chain. In birds of prey, DDT made eggshells so thin and brittle that many broke before hatching.

Those effects informed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book that helped catalyse the modern environmental movement. “If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones – we had better know something about their nature and their power,” Carson wrote. DDT was banned in 1972.

A photograph from Torrance, California, showed industrial factories beside a canal leading to the nearby Pacific Ocean. Its caption reported that a nearby chemical factory produced DDT in the 1970s before it was torn down and polluted a large area of the Pacific. The caption said seabirds and mammals were estimated to face effects from that pollution for hundreds of years.

Another photograph showed Dr Furcolow examining an X-ray of a bald eagle in 1972. He found buckshot, buckshot wounds and indications of lung disease.

Bird described the combined effects of bounties and reproductive collapse as a “double whammy” that put sustained pressure on bald eagles. By 1963, only 417 breeding pairs remained in the lower 48 states. DDT had been used less extensively north of the US border, making Canadian populations a source for restoration programs.

President Bill Clinton met Challenger, a male bald eagle, in the Rose Garden on July 2, 1999. Clinton was celebrating the Endangered Species Act and announcing action to remove the American bald eagle from the endangered-species list.

Bald eagles have continued to appear at public events. Lincoln the Bald Eagle flew over the crowd during the UFC Freedom 250 ceremonial weigh-in at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, on June 13, 2026.

Bird said people sharing memes about the eagle and goose may not know the countries’ shared conservation history. He said Canada geese can be prey for an eagle but are also “formidable” and can easily break an eagle’s wings.

Bird also cited the common loon, which appears on Canada’s one-dollar coin. In 2020, an eagle was found dead and floating in a Maine lake. A necropsy confirmed that the eagle had threatened a common loon and its chick. “It stabbed the eagle through the heart with its beak,” Bird said.

Bird said that, given the current political climate, the symbolism was “hard to ignore.”