The bald eagle : A True survivor's story. The bald eagle a lare bird with a wite hard,brown body and bright yellow eyes. It has sharp claws an is feet and a hooked beak to catch and eat fish. It is the national symbol of the United states of America and it appears on US money. The bald eagle got its name from the early calonists. In those day, ' bald ' meant ' white '. In the 1700s there were hundreds of thousands of these birds in North America. The eagle population became very small thought because people nunted them and because of a dangerous chemical preyed on crops. In the 1960s, scientists noticed that only 450 pairs of bald eagles were liveing in the wild. So,in 1978 the goverment put the bald eagle on the endangered species list. By the 1980s numbers were rising again. Today,the bale eagle is safe from extinction.