By Greg Martin

Liberty Wildlife Contributor

In the year 9 AD, a Roman army met annihilation in the foreboding shadows of the Teutoburg Forest in northern Germany. As many as 30,000 died in that Germanic ambush, a rare and horrific defeat for a burgeoning Empire just entering its prime.[1]Arguably worst of all was the fact that Publius Quinctilius Varus, still infamous in 2019 for having led his force to complete destruction in year 9, lost his eagles.

A life was a life, but those eagles were sacred, and Augustus spared neither time, expense, nor soldiers’ lives in seeking both bloody vengeance and their swift return. Every Roman legion carried an eagle standard, and to surrender such a symbol of Rome’s vitality to an enemy was worse than losing an actual battle: such was the belief of the Romans, and such was the preeminence of the eagle as their symbol. That reverence is not unique to Western Civilization; the eagle is the human ideal of all that is noble and powerful, regardless of culture or continent. The only two eagle species of North America are also its most iconic emblems: the Bald Eagle graces the Great Seal of the United States, its talons bearing both the olive branch and the arrows of war; the Golden Eagle with a snake in its beak is a Mexican icon dating back to the Aztecs, who saw that same bird as a divine sign from their god well before Columbus was even born. They never knew about Rome or its eagles, yet the symbol was to them the same.

Crazy Horse wore a single eagle feather tied in his hair, all the power he needed at the Greasy Grass or Little Bighorn.[2]Eagles embodied just as much for his people and for other groups indigenous to the Americas as they did for anyone in Europe. Mongolians on the other side of the world still hunt on the steppes of Asia with Golden Eagles, just as their ancestors did – and as Genghis and Kublai did – in a tradition of partnership and awe that dates to time immemorial.[3]There are more than sixty kinds of eagle to be found in the world, which makes our North American pair seem rather paltry, in quantity at least.[4]As might be expected, that many eagles invariably leads to some specialized examples, famously illustrated by the Harpy Eagle of South America. This massively strong terror of the treetops boasts almost comically short wings, at least in comparison to its more traditional cousins; in this sense, it resembles the Accipiters of North America, short-winged hawks whose forest environments require hunting at breakneck speeds and with hairpin turns, where even the slightest miscalculation means immediate death. The Harpy Eagle, living in the rainforest, relies on the same concept of movement, even if one of its favorite foods is the happy-go-lucky sloth. Hardly a speed demon to catch, but still: flying through the jungle, especially if you’re the size of an eagle, requires incalculable deftness.

In contrast to its South American cousin, and also to the Bald Eagle that only calls our own continent home, the Golden Eagle of Mexican flag fame is a true world conqueror. This is the bird of the Great Khans, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Russian Tsars, and the Caesars themselves. Theirs is the shadow passing overhead that makes even wolves think twice. Symbols of power, emblems of empires, eagles of all sorts are embodiments of human unity. And that is their most incredible legacy. After all, for all our differences, and for all the distances between us in life and in thought, it says something indeed if people across oceans, across time and across continents, can see the same bird and all think the same thing.