Davis, Jack E.

Jack E. Davis is a professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea and An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. In The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird (Liveright), Davis takes readers from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species. He contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others – whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides – twice pushed the species to the brink of extinction. Americans have celebrated the bald eagle as majestic and noble, yet savaged this national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Filled with stories of Founding Fathers, The Bald Eagle is a cultural and natural history demonstrating how this bird’s wondrous journey may inspire us today as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.