{"id":1009,"date":"2025-08-12T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2025-08-15T19:21:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T19:21:13","slug":"the-trump-administration-apparently-cares-abouteagles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/12\/the-trump-administration-apparently-cares-abouteagles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trump administration apparently cares about\u2026eagles?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tA bald eagle perched on a tree in Seward, Alaska. The state has the largest bald eagle population in the country. | Hasan Akbas\/Anadolu via Getty Images\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Trump administration is worried, it would seem, about eagles \u2014 like, the big birds of prey with sharp talons and famously good eyesight. <\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who oversees endangered species, wrote on X<\/a> that wind-energy projects kill eagles, including the iconic bald eagle, and his agency would work to protect them from harm. <\/p>\n

He even appended a memo to the post that directs the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which falls under Burgum\u2019s command, to enforce an existing law called the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act<\/a> to make sure that these birds are not \u201csacrificed\u201d for wind power. The law makes killing or harming eagles <\/strong>without a government permit illegal. <\/p>\n

One possible interpretation is that Burgum simply cares about birds. Or the bald eagle, anyway, a national symbol.<\/p>\n

A more obvious one is that the Trump administration continues to do everything it can to shutter or stall the build-out of US wind farms \u2014 which Trump really seems to abhor<\/a>. That apparently includes suddenly caring about certain <\/strong>wildlife regulations.<\/p>\n

To be clear, wind turbines are, in fact, a serious threat to birds of prey, including eagles<\/a>, and to bats<\/a>, especially when they\u2019re not built or operated with wildlife in mind. Accurate estimates are hard to come by, though it\u2019s reasonable to assume that turbine blades kill hundreds of eagles per year<\/a> nationwide. That number is somewhere around 1 million birds per year if you account for all avian species, according to data scientist Hannah Ritchie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That being said, a much<\/em> bigger threat to birds is stray cats, buildings, and cars. Cats, alone, kill as many as 2.4 billion birds<\/a> per year nationwide. Yes, billion<\/em>. <\/p>\n

And another more serious threat than turbines? Climate change \u2014 the very problem that wind energy is helping fix. A landmark 2019 report<\/a> by the National Audubon Society, a nonprofit bird conservation group, found that rising temperatures put nearly two-thirds of North American bird species at an elevated risk of extinction, including golden eagles. <\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s this: Although bald eagles were once on the brink of extinction, these birds are doing just fine now. Actually more than fine. Between 2009 and 2019, their population in the lower 48 states quadrupled<\/a> to more than 300,000 individuals, close to historic population estimates. That doesn\u2019t include Alaska \u2014 home to the largest bald eagle population in the US<\/a> \u2014 where some people consider them pests<\/a> because they\u2019re so abundant.<\/p>\n

Bald eagles don\u2019t need saving from Trump officials. <\/p>\n

The many species that do, meanwhile, are losing protections because of policy decisions by those very same officials. So far, the Trump administration has moved to limit the scope of laws meant to safeguard migratory birds<\/a>, including eagles, and all federally endangered species<\/a>, seemingly to loosen restrictions on the oil and gas industry. Separately, in May, the administration took steps to undo federal protections for the lesser prairie-chicken<\/a>, an imperiled ground bird in Texas that lives atop oil-rich lands. It\u2019s also planning to open up eagle-filled wilderness in Alaska<\/a> to drilling, cut funding<\/a> for a bird-monitoring<\/a> program, and log more US forests<\/a>, which are famously where birds live.<\/p>\n

Ironically, it\u2019s the policies and programs that Trump officials are now eroding that helped save bald eagles in the first place. So if the administration was serious about helping eagles \u2014 or the hundreds of other American bird species, from hummingbirds to owls \u2014 it\u2019s pretty clear that its actions would look a lot different.<\/p>\n

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A bald eagle perched on a tree in Seward, Alaska. The state has the largest bald eagle population in the country. | Hasan Akbas\/Anadolu via Getty Images The Trump administration is worried, it would seem, about eagles \u2014 like, the big birds of prey with sharp talons and famously good eyesight.  Earlier this month, Interior…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}