I get that the actual sounds of bald eagles don’t sound cool enough or something, I’m just more interested in when did this happen
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Film and TV, particularly in the early black-and-white days where sound effects were still being pioneered.
They wanted something distinctive and memorable in order to key in the minds of the viewer what an eagle was. Red-tailed hawks have a very distinctive cry, that doesn’t sound silly or chirpy, but rather pretty clearly like a predatory bird. They’re also a very common bird, and it was easy to get a good recording of a red-tailed hawk cry, so it was cheap and easy to use. [Actual bald eagles sound like seagulls. Here’s a comparison.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrD4OvLiT7k)
Stock sound effects can easily become entrenched like this. TVTropes has a page about it, “reality is unrealistic,” where they talk about the places that film and television (and other things) have entrenched in audience minds that certain things look or sound a certain way even though they don’t. E.g., when you draw a sword from a scabbard, it should NOT make an audible “shink!” noise, that’s *bad,* that happens when metal is scraping against metal and you don’t want that with a sword. Drawing a sword should sound like shifting around wood or leather, as that’s what most scabbards are made of. It’s really quite an uninteresting sound in most cases, nowhere near as *cool* as the noise used in movies.
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