WABASHA Minn. – “About time,” says Ed Hahn, marketing director for the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. The U.S. House and Senate approved legislation this week to make the bald eagle the national bird. When the bill is signed by President Biden, the bald eagle will be elevated to the role that many already assumed it had. The new bill corrects a historic oversight, Hahn said. The nation’s founders debated what the national bird should be in 1776. Benjamin Franklin favored the turkey. But Preston Cook, a naturalist doing latter-day research at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, discovered that Congress never acted. Soon, 248 years later, the United States will have a national bird.
Iconic but officially unrecognized. The bald eagle has recovered from near extinction due to agricultural use of DDT as an insecticide poison following World War II. Due to protective-status legislation, the population has grown to 316,00 in the Lower 48 states plus 35,000 in Alaska. Image: Minnesota Natural Resources Department