From the Spring 2025 difficulty of Dwelling Fowl journal. Subscribe now.
Simply earlier than the top of 2024, the Bald Eagle lastly grew to become the nationwide fowl of the USA, when President Joe Biden signed laws that provides the majestic creature its rightful, if long-delayed, perch atop America’s birds.
Till now, no American president or Congress had ever formally acknowledged Haliaeetus leucocephalus because the nation’s official fowl, despite the fact that the Bald Eagle was already the starring attraction on the Nice Seal of the USA, with an olive department in a single talon and arrows within the different. In 1969, when the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, touched down on the moon, astronaut Neil Armstrong immortalized the second by declaring, “The Eagle has landed.”
The thought for the laws got here from Preston Prepare dinner, an avid eagle memorabilia collector and writer of the 2019 guide American Eagle: A Visible Historical past of Our Nationwide Emblem.
“Our Bald Eagle has two wings, a proper wing and a left wing, and a physique center, representing all People,” Prepare dinner mentioned at a celebration of the invoice’s passage on the Nationwide Eagle Heart in late December. The eagle, he mentioned, is “a logo of freedom, liberty, independence, power, household, and patriotism.”
The Nationwide Eagle Heart is positioned in Wabasha, Minnesota, a small city on the banks of the Mississippi River that sits alongside a serious flyway for migratory eagles. The eagle heart homes the Preston Prepare dinner American Eagle Assortment, which options greater than 40,000 items of artwork, historic artifacts, and memorabilia that remember the Bald Eagle in American tradition.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who sponsored the invoice, additionally spoke on the celebration.
“The power, the tenacity, and relentlessness of the Bald Eagle match the individuals on this room,” Klobuchar mentioned, in line with a WCCO information story. “These values of freedom, we consider the eagle, hovering over these stunning rivers, the values of being stewards of our land, which this space is all about right here.”
Native U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad, a Republican representing Minnesota’s First Congressional District who sponsored the Bald Eagle invoice within the Home, mentioned in a press release that People have lengthy revered the Bald Eagle “because the unquestionable icon of the USA.” With the brand new regulation, he added, “we rightfully acknowledge the Bald Eagle as our official nationwide fowl—bestowing an honor that’s lengthy overdue.”
The bipartisan invoice handed the Senate by unanimous consent in July; the Home authorized it in mid-December, within the waning days of the lame-duck session. President Biden signed it on December 24.
In regards to the Writer
Frederic J. Frommer is a contract journalist who writes concerning the surroundings and politics from his dwelling in Washington, D.C.
