The Senate steps in belatedly, centuries later, to name the bald eagle as the national bird

With the Senate about to go into recess, the Senate has taken action to correct an oversight that many Americans may not have even been aware of when lawmakers passed a bill to designate the bald eagle as the national bird.

The golden eagle has been widely recognized as the national bird of the United States since its inclusion on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. Just as the Baltimore Oriole is the state bird of Maryland, the robin bears that name in Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

But in recent years, authors of books about the bald eagle have discovered that Congress has never officially designated the bird as its national symbol, even though it is the only flying creature that graces U.S. currency, many military insignia, and the seals of numerous government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice.

“It’s amazing to me that no one has noticed this before,” said Preston Cook, who over nearly six decades has collected more than 40,000 pieces of eagle memorabilia that are now housed at the National Eagle Center, a nonprofit educational organization in Wabasha, Minnesota.

“But it’s one of those little pieces of history that I don’t want to put on anymore,” Cook said. “I want to make sure it’s in its proper place and that it’s our national bird.”

Cook, who wrote “American Eagle: A Visual History of Our National Emblem,” published in 2019, and Jack E. Davis, a history professor at the University of Florida who wrote “The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird,” published in 2022, teamed up this year to persuade lawmakers to make it official, targeting states with some of the largest bald eagle populations, asking them to introduce legislation recognizing it as the national bird of the United States.

The Senate bill, filed by Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis, passed unanimously on July 29.

“These majestic creatures have long been considered the official bird of this country, and it’s high time we made them official without costing taxpayers a cent,” Lummis said in a statement when the bill was introduced in June.

A companion bill sponsored by Rep. Brad Finstad, R-Minn., is expected to become law in the fall. “I am proud to partner with the National Eagle Center in Wabasha to introduce this legislation that will officially classify the bald eagle as our national bird — its rightful place of honor as an integral part of our national identity,” Finstad said.

“There really is very little reason not to support it,” Cook said. “It doesn’t require any funding or change anything because everyone already believes it’s the national bird.”

From souvenirs to movement

Cook’s lifelong obsession with eagles began when he was growing up in a family of collectors in California in the 1960s. He went to see the 1965 film “A Thousand Clowns,” in which free-spirited Murray Burns, played by Jason Robards, visited a New York antique shop and bought an eagle figurine, saying, “You can’t have too many eagles.”

“As I was leaving the theater, I said to myself, ‘This could be an interesting collectible,’” Cook said. A few months later, he was drafted into the Army and issued a uniform with brass buttons bearing the Army seal, which depicts an eagle with an olive branch in one talon and 13 arrows in the other. That was the beginning of his collection of more than 40,000 eagle artifacts, now on display at the center in Wabasha, not far from Cook’s current home on the banks of the Mississippi River.

About 15 years ago, Cook decided to write a book of his memorabilia and wanted to include a chronological account of America’s relationship with eagles, beginning with the adoption of the Great Seal of the United States on June 20, 1782, by the Second Continental Congress.

That’s when he discovered that the eagle had never been officially recognized as the national bird. He shared his findings with the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who appointed Cook to the San Francisco Housing Commission when she was mayor in the late 1970s. Feinstein wrote to Cook in 2011 that he was right. He and Davis, a fellow eagle-lover in Florida, used Feinstein’s letter to persuade Klobuchar and other lawmakers to introduce legislation to make the declaration.

Both Cook and Davis say the story of the bald eagle has some parallels with the history of America itself.

The bald eagle has long been revered as a symbol of the nation’s strength, Davis said, but has also long been criticized for being a fierce predator that preys on smaller animals weighing up to 5 pounds that the majestic birds can easily hunt and take.

“Americans have always loved the image of the bald eagle since 1782, but they have not appreciated the species itself. Killing a bald eagle in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries was considered a civic duty” to protect livestock, backyard chickens and even infants, although there has never been a recorded case of an eagle killing a child, he said.

The slaughter decimated the bald eagle population so much that Congress passed a law in 1940 that made it illegal to kill the birds or harm their eggs. That allowed the eagle population to recover until the pesticide DDT was introduced after World War II as the primary method of killing mosquitoes, which can carry malaria and other diseases.

Environmental researchers learned that DDT thinned the shells of eagle eggs so that most of them were destroyed when mother eagles landed on them in the nest. This discovery, made public in the writings of Rachel Carson, led to a ban on DDT in 1973, just after the passage of the Endangered Species Act, which added more federal protections for eagles.

“We’ve brought the bald eagle to the brink of extinction twice in the lower 48 states, but we’ve rehabilitated ourselves twice,” Davis said. There are now an estimated 500,000 bald eagles in North America, he said.

“In many ways, it is consistent with our history,” Cook said. “It is a survival story. It is a success story. To me, it is a story of government involvement in the survival of this bird, because if the government had not intervened, we would not have this bird.”

Lummis said much the same thing when the Senate passed the bill last week.

“For more than 240 years, the bald eagle has been synonymous with American values, but it is still not officially our national bird,” she said. “Today’s bipartisan passage brings us one step closer to solidifying the eagle as an enduring symbol of our freedom, and I look forward to seeing this legislation passed by the House of Representatives and signed into law soon.”