The bald eagle is actually a sea eagle ( Haliaeet.... eagl bald

The bald eagle is actually a sea eagle ( Haliaeetus species) that commonly occurs inland along rivers and large lakes. Bald eagles pluck fish out of the water with their talons, and sometimes they follow seabirds as a means of locating fish. Besides live fish, bald eagles also prey on other birds, small mammals, snakes, turtles, and crabs, and they readily eat carrion. Bald eagles may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands when they were declared the American national bird in 1782, but their numbers steadily declined over the next two centuries owing to human activities and persecution. government's Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 made it illegal to kill bald eagles (Alaska was exempt), but the birds' numbers continued to decline, primarily because of the effects of the pesticide , which came into widespread agricultural use after World War II. By the early 1960s, the number of bald eagles in the coterminous United States had dropped to fewer than 450 nesting pairs. Th! e bald eagle was reclassified from endangered to status in 1995, by which time there were an estimated 4,500 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. Lloyd Kiff MLA style: "bald eagle ( Haliaeetus leucocephalus ) ."