Blog No 20 Bald Eagle as our National Bird

Immediately after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a committee was appointed to design a seal for the new nation of the United States.  After six years of work by the committee, the Great Seal of the United States was adopted by the Continental Congress on June 20, 1882, and featured our bald eagle as its centerpiece. Ben Franklin in a letter to his daughter in 1884 described the bald eagles as “a bird of bad moral behavior,” presumably because bald eagles routinely wait for an osprey to catch a fish which they can steal due to their superior strength and size.  Although Ben Franklin thought our wild turkey would have been a better candidate, there is no evidence that Franklin formally protested the Congress’s choice, as is widely thought.

The golden eagle is wilder and more ferocious (and I would argue grander) than the bald eagle but its distribution is not limited to North America but is found widely throughout  much of the northern hemisphere.  The bald eagle’s distribution is limited to North America from Alaska to the northern Mexico and from that perspective is well suited as our national bird.

Although the bald eagle graced our Great Seal for 140 years, it did not officially become our national bird until legislation was sign by President Joe Biden on December 24, 2024. Let us hope the bald eagle will continue to be our official national bird.

The population of the bald eagle reached its lowest in 1963 when there were only 417 known nesting pair in the lower 48 states.  Its precipitous decline was attributed to the wide spread use of the pesticide DDT (caused thinning of the eggshell) as well as illegal shooting and loss of habitat.  Shown below are photos of a pair of bald eagles that nested in midst of a sprawling urban region of south Florida.

All photos by author

 On the Current River in Missouri 

Near Quiet Waters Park

Bald eagle nest

Osprey nest

Bald eagle nest

Osprey, Ten Thousand Islands