WABASHA, Minn. – You’d be forgiven if you didn’t think this was necessary, but the bald eagle is one step closer to being named the national bird of the United States.
Late on a Monday evening in July, after most senators had already gone home, a motion was unanimously passed by the Senate to include the formal national bird designation in the United States Code.
“Without objection, it is so ordered,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., passed the bill with no one else in the chamber.
That’s how it went to the House of Representatives.
The U.S. Code already designates the oak as the national tree of the United States and the rose as the national flower, and Congress even voted to designate the bison as a national mammal in 2016, but the bald eagle is not the national bird of the United States USA – yet.
Thanks to one man who discovered the omission, Congress is about to correct it. The House passed the bill Monday night, sending it to President Joe Biden to sign into law and formalize the national significance of the bald eagle in one of Congress’ final acts of the year.
Preston Cook looks at his collection of more than 40,000 eagle artifacts, housed in Wabasha, Minnesota.
The ‘eagle evangelist’
The bald eagle is a particular passion in Wabasha, Minnesota, where the National Eagle Center sits on the banks of the Mississippi River. The city, which calls itself the “Eagle Capital of America,” is home to approximately 1,500 residents, including one person who has dedicated his life to the legacy of the bald eagle.
Preston Cook is, to say the least, 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 enough eagles,'” Cook said. “I walked out of the theater and said this might be interesting to collect.”
Preston Cook keeps a box of eagle pins in one of the two warehouses that house his collection, which has grown to more than 40,000 eagle items since he started collecting in the 1960s.
So he started collecting and collecting and collecting. Over the decades, Cook’s hoard has expanded to more than 40,000 items, a collection he says 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 collecting here, but I enjoyed the whole process.”
Housed in two warehouses just steps from the Mississippi River, the collection ranges from political pins to paintings and magazine covers to playing cards. There are Lego sets and sculptures, ginger beer bottles and eagle-enchanted stilettos.
Preston Cook looks at his collection of more than 40,000 eagle items.
The collection became so large that Cook started looking for a place to put it. It found a home at 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 Myth of Turkey
The omission came as a shock to National Eagle Center staff, who thought the honor had already been awarded to the bird that nests in the trees surrounding their headquarters. Minnesota has the second largest nesting population of bald eagles in the country, behind only Alaska.
“Preston Cook brought that up to us years ago, and it was like, ‘Oh, come on, you’re kidding,’” said Scott Mehus, director of education at the National Eagle Center. ‘I have been talking and telling stories in classes all these years [people] it is the symbol of our nation and our national bird.”
“I have been wrong all these years, and so have everyone 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 charged with the responsibility, could not agree to a seal to represent the country, so Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson submitted a version in 1782 featuring the bald eagle, which was approved later that year. The eagle-adorned seal was first used on a document authorizing George Washington to negotiate a prisoner of war exchange and has been a national symbol ever since.
Eagle items in one of two warehouses housing Preston Cook’s collection of more than 40,000 Eagle items.
But not all Founding Fathers were fans of the eagle. Franklin wrote in a famous letter to his daughter that he wished the eagle had not been chosen to represent the United States. He called him “a bird of bad moral character” and added: “He doesn’t earn his living honestly.”
Franklin continued in his letter that “the Turkey is a much more respectable bird in comparison, and, moreover, a truly original inhabitant of America.”
But it is a myth that Franklin led discussions about making the turkey the national bird; historians think he was joking. “He never advocated for the turkey to be our great seal,” Scott said, although he admitted that Franklin had made some negative comments about the eagle.
Preston Cook looks at his collection.
The bill
“This is one of the few laws that won’t make a difference,” Cook jokes.
The bill that Cook himself initially wrote and sent to Congress has no money attached to it; it doesn’t even help conservation efforts regarding bald eagles. It simply draws a line in the U.S. code between the national tree and the guidelines for inaugural ceremonies, stating: “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 for unanimous passage in the House.
Eagle items in one of two warehouses housing Preston Cook’s collection.
“They’re the ones who 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.”
An act of Congress and the signature of the President are required to designate each item with the “national” title; the rose received the honor in 1986 and the oak in 2004.
“Nobody has to change anything; it’s just a correction. It’s just a correction to history to set things right and make things the way they should be,” Cook said. “It was one of those little pieces of history that I felt needed to 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 was given when he was drafted into the Army in the 1960s and which are now sewn onto the blue blazer he often wears.
“I got these buttons on my dress uniform with the big seal. Two years later I got out, cut 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 started me collecting eagles for the rest of my life.”
Preston Cook with his collection.
He looks at tables covered with old magazine covers showing caricatures of eagles flying away with small children in their talons and admits that he hasn’t stopped collecting things, calling it “a working collection.” He runs the items through exhibits for children and interested visitors to view at the National Eagle Center, but jokes, “Don’t tell my wife I’m still collecting.”
“My wife has been very tolerant and I appreciate her for that,” he said. “Every now and then she says, ‘You have too many eagles.’ She says that every now and then.”
But like law, marriage is about compromise, and even the Cook household has its limits.
“She says, ‘You can put them anywhere in the house, but you can’t put them in the bedroom,’” Cook said with a laugh. “I said, ‘Okay, I can live with that.'”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
