No, it currently is not. However, the bald eagle is one step closer to receiving that designation.
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. And 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.
After the omission was discovered, Congress set out to rectify it. The House recently passed the bill, 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 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.
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 on 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 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.
