Two Bald Eagles
For the past year or more residents of the Dundee, Illinois, area along the Fox River have been watching the antics of a mated pair of Bald Eagles and their 2011 offspring. In early 2011 it was easy to distinguish the adults from the juvenile. The younger bird had not developed the white head and tail feathers and its efforts to catch food were clumsy.
I’m not certain of this, but I think the eagle on the right in the pictures above and below is the juvenile. That judgement is based on the rather submissive way it acted after landing on the perch next to the eagle on the left.
After watching and photographing this pair of Bald Eagles, I commented to my wife that we were having a Double Eagle” morning. She asked me what the double eagle phrase referenced. I told her it was a gold coin. She snickered and said, “Oh sure, a coin put out by one of those phoney commercial mints.”
Nope … a Double Eagle is a $20 gold coin that was first issued by the United States in the mid-1800s.
The “eagle” names given to gold U.S. coins are not nicknames; the “eagle,” “half-eagle” and “quarter-eagle” were specifically given these names in the Act of Congress that originally authorized them. Likewise, the Double Eagle was specifically created with that name. Since the $20 gold piece had twice the value of the eagle, these coins were designated “double eagles”.
The first double eagle was minted in 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush. In that year, the mint produced the initial proofs. Regular production began in 1850 and continued until 1933. Prior to 1850, eagles with a denomination of $10 were the largest denomination of US coin. $10 eagles were produced beginning in 1795, just two years after the first U.S. mint opened. In 1850, the double eagle had the purchasing power of about $530 in 2011 dollars.
