Page 85 - South Mississippi Living - July, 2026

Mississippians might spot
eagles in more places than
around the University
of Southern Mississippi
campuses in Hattiesburg and Long
Beach.
When the United States
became a new nation, Benjamin Franklin wanted to
declare the wild turkey the national symbol. Instead,
the Founding Fathers chose the bald eagle, but things didn’t always go so
well for the national bird. Many people shot eagles
whenever they saw them to protect chickens and other farm
animals. However, poison nearly
led to their extinction. The widely used pesticide DDT contaminated fish and birds
that ate insects. When eagles consumed contaminated prey, they ingested the poison. The pesticide made bird eggshells very brittle. When eagle parents sat on their nests, their crushed their offspring.
In the early 1800s, bald eagles lived everywhere in what became the Lower 48 states. By the mid-20th century, though, eagles became very scarce in every
state except Alaska. In the 1950s, only 412 nesting pairs remained outside of Alaska and Canada.
The Environmental Protection
Agency finally banned DDT in 1972. Slowly eagle populations began to recover. The EPA downgraded eagles from “endangered” to “threatened” in 1995 and removed the birds entirely off the list in 2007.
Today, people might spot bald eagles anywhere in Mississippi all year long. Their iconic snow-white head and tail feathers plus bright yellow beaks and talons make adult bald eagles easy to identify. Juveniles remain darker until they
grow their familiar white
head and tail feathers at
about five years old.
Highly adaptive, bald eagles can live wherever they can find food from swamps and marshes
to mountains. Bald
eagles love to snatch fish
from lakes, but these
opportunistic predators
eat whatever they can
catch, including birds,
rats, mice, rabbits, and other small animals.
Since eagles love to eat fish, they commonly nest and feed along wooded shorelines of major lakes and rivers. Eagles make the largest tree nests of any bird in
Grenada, Sardis and Ross Barnett Reservoirs as well as along the Pascagoula and Pearl Rivers.
Some bald eagles nest and breed in
the Magnolia State, but like waterfowl, thousands more migrate to the Gulf Coast during the winter. In Mississippi, the bald eagle population peaks from mid-December to early March. Migrating eagles frequently return to the same nests year after year.
Bird watchers might also see a bald eagle’s slightly larger cousin. More common in the deserts and mountains
of the western states and northern Mexico, a few golden eagles do visit Mississippi, especially during the winter. Golden eagles prefer more open country, so people here would more likely spot them around fields or
meadows looking for mice and rabbits. Bald eagles weigh about eight to 15
pounds. Darker goldens weigh about the same, but stand slightly taller than their white-headed cousins. The wingspan of a golden eagle can reach up to about eight feet long while a bald eagle can extend its wings to about 7.5 feet. People might spot golden eagles around the Davis Bayou area of Ocean Springs, especially during late winter or early spring.
Eagles and all birds of prey remain protected by federal law. Watch and photograph, but leave them alone.
SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living | www.smliving.net
July 2026 | 85
North America. Made nests measure
eight
of sticks, some more than feet across
and 13 feet deep. They
might weigh a ton. Some
great places to see eagles include
Golden Eagle