Bald eagle becomes official U.S. national bird after long ambiguity

President Joe Biden signed a law on Dec. 23, 2024, formally designating the bald eagle as the national bird of the United States.

The bird’s place on the nation’s visual identity dates to the Great Seal of the United States, adopted on June 20, 1782 after six years, three committees and 14 men worked through the design. The eagle on the seal carries 13 arrows and a shield with 13 stripes to represent the original states, and the U.S. Department of State uses the Great Seal on treaties, commissions and about 3,000 official documents each year.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put the lower 48 bald eagle population at 316,700 individuals, including 71,467 breeding pairs, based on 2018-2019 data, roughly quadruple the 2009 estimate of 72,434 individuals and 30,548 breeding pairs. The species was first protected by Congress in 1940, the law was expanded in 1962 to cover golden eagles, DDT was banned in 1972, the bald eagle was listed as endangered in 1978 and removed from the federal endangered and threatened list in the lower 48 states in 2007, when officials cited nearly 10,000 nesting pairs, up from about 400 four decades earlier.

Habitat destruction and degradation helped decimate the species. A U.S. Geological Survey study of 1,210 bald and golden eagles from 38 states found chronic lead poisoning in 46 to 47 percent of eagles and estimated that level suppresses bald eagle population growth by 3.8 percent. Another USGS study tied bald eagle abundance in Washington’s Skagit River to salmon timing and flood events.