WABASHA, Minn. — You would be excused if you thought this wasn’t necessary, but the bald eagle is one step closer to being designated the national bird of the United States.
Late one Monday evening back in July after most senators had already gone home for the day, a unanimous motion passed the Senate to slip the formal national bird designation into the U.S. code.
“Without objection, it is so ordered,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., moved to pass the bill with no one else in the chamber.
Just like that, it was off to the House.
The U.S. code already designates the oak tree as the national tree of the United States and the rose as the national flower, and Congress even voted in 2016 to deem the bison the national mammal, but the bald eagle is not the national bird of the U.S. — yet.
Thanks to one man who discovered the omission, Congress is about to correct that. The House passed the bill Monday night, sending it to President Joe Biden to sign into law and formalize the bald eagle’s national significance in one of Congress’ last acts of the year.
The ‘eaglevangelist’
The bald eagle is a particular passion in Wabasha, Minnesota, where the National Eagle Center sits on the bank of the Mississippi River. The self-designated “Eagle Capital of America,” the city has a population of about 1,500 people, including one person who has dedicated his life to the bald eagle’s legacy.
Preston Cook is, to put it mildly, obsessed with bald eagles.
“I saw a movie called ‘A Thousand Clowns’ in 1966 and there was one line in the movie, ‘You can’t have too many eagles,’” Cook said. “I walked out of the theater and I said that might be an interesting thing to collect.”
So, he started collecting and collecting and collecting. Over the decades, Cook’s trove has ballooned to over 40,000 items, a collection that he believes is the largest in the country.
“If it had an eagle on it, I’d buy it,” Cook said, “I may have gotten a little carried away in my collecting here, but I’ve loved the whole process.”
The collection lives in two warehouses just steps from the Mississippi River and ranges from political pins to paintings and magazine covers to playing cards. There are lego sets and sculptures, ginger beer bottles and eagle bedazzled stilettos.
The collection became so big that Cook began looking for a place to put it. It found a home in the National Eagle Center in Wabasha.
He also decided to turn his collection into a book, and while researching the eagle’s place in American history, he came to a realization.
“We’ve never had a national bird,” Cook said.
The turkey myth
The omission came as a shock to the staff at the National Eagle Center, who thought the honor had already been bestowed on the bird that nests in the trees surrounding their headquarters. Minnesota has the second-largest nesting population of bald eagles in the country, trailing only Alaska.
“Preston Cook brought that up to us years ago, and it was like, ‘Oh, come on, you’re kidding me,’” said Scott Mehus, the education director at the National Eagle Center. “I’ve been talking in classes all of these years, telling [people] it’s our nation’s symbol and our national bird.”
“I’ve been wrong all these years and so has everybody else in the country,” Mehus said.
The bald eagle became the nation’s most prominent bird when it was placed on the great seal shortly after the country’s founding. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were originally tasked with the responsibility, were unable to agree to a seal to represent the country, so in 1782, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson submitted a version with the bald eagle, which was approved later that year. The eagle-emblazoned seal was first used on a document authorizing George Washington to negotiate a prisoner-of-war exchange and has been a national symbol since.
But not all of the Founding Fathers were fans of the eagle. Franklin famously wrote in a letter to his daughter that he wished the eagle had not been chosen as the representative for the United States, calling it “a bird of bad moral character” and adding, “He does not get his living honestly.”
Franklin went on to say in his letter that “the Turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original Native of America.”
But it’s a myth that Franklin led discussions about making the turkey the national bird; historians believe he was joking. “He never advocated for the turkey to be our great seal,” Scott said, though he admitted Franklin made some negative comments about the eagle.
The bill
“This is one of those few laws that’s going to make no difference,” Cook jokes.
The bill Cook himself initially wrote and sent to Congress has no money attached to it; it doesn’t even assist in conservation efforts related to bald eagles. It simply slips a line into the U.S. code between the national tree and the guidelines for inaugural ceremonies that says, “The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) is the national bird.”
He sent the bill to the offices of Minnesota lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, and a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., brought it to the floor to be passed unanimously in the upper chamber.
“They are the ones that came to us and said it’s not the national bird,” Klobuchar said of the National Eagle Center and Cook. “So that was the impetus.”
It takes an act of Congress and the president’s signature to designate any item with the “national” title; the rose got the honor in 1986 and the oak tree in 2004.
“No one has to change anything; it’s just a correction. It is only a correction in history to make things right and makes things the way they should be,” Cook said. “It was one of those little pieces of history that I felt should be taken care of, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The blazer
Cook doesn’t literally wear his passion for eagles on his sleeve, but it’s close. He wears a bow tie embroidered with an eagle and an eagle pin on his lapel, and eagles even fly on his red, white and blue suspenders.
When you ask him what his most prized eagle possession is, he points to the buttons he received when he was drafted into the Army in the 1960s, which are now sewn onto the blue blazer he wears often.
“I was issued these buttons on my dress uniform that has the great seal. Two years later, I got out, snipped the buttons off my military uniform, and I’ve been wearing them ever since,” he said. “These are the first items in my collection, and that gave me a start on collecting eagles for the rest of my life.”
He looks at tables covered with old magazine covers showing caricatures of eagles flying away with small children in their talons and admits he hasn’t stopped gathering items, calling it “a working collection.” He cycles the items through exhibits for children and interested visitors to look at in the National Eagle Center, but jokes: “Don’t tell my wife that I’m still collecting.”
“My wife has been very tolerant, and I appreciate her for that,” he said. “Occasionally, she will say, ‘You have too many eagles.’ Occasionally, she’ll say that.”
But just like legislating, marriage is about compromise, and even Cook’s household has its limits.
“She says, ‘You can put them wherever you want in the house, but you cannot put them in the bedroom,’” Cook said with a laugh. “I said, ‘OK, I can live with that one.’”
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