# Bald eagle becomes the U.S. national bird after Biden signs bill

The United States had never formally named a national bird until December 24, 2024, when President Joe Biden signed a bill putting the bald eagle into the U.S. code.

The bald eagle is now officially America’s national bird after President Joe Biden signed a bill on December 24, 2024, finally giving federal law a symbol the country had long treated as self-evident.

The evidence packet says the bird had never before been formally designated in the United States Code, despite its central place on the Great Seal and in American civic imagery. That makes the new law less a symbolic invention than a legal correction. For almost 250 years, the bald eagle was treated as the nation’s bird without the statute saying so.

Congress passed the bill unanimously. The measure had already cleared the Senate with bipartisan support and then moved through the House without opposition. That path suggests lawmakers saw the change as straightforward and ceremonial rather than partisan or policy-heavy.

The founding-era backstory helps explain why the eagle became so embedded in national symbolism. The packet says Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were originally tasked with creating a national seal but could not agree. In 1782, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson submitted the version with the bald eagle, and it was approved.

The Great Seal image is familiar to most Americans: the eagle holding a shield, an olive branch and arrows. The design has long carried ideas of peace, strength and military readiness, even though it took centuries for Congress to put a simple label on the bird itself.

Franklin was famously unconvinced. The packet says he called the bald eagle “a bird of bad moral character” in a letter to his daughter. That criticism did nothing to dislodge the bird’s place in the national imagination, but it does show that the choice was once contested.

One of the more unusual details in the packet is the role of Preston Cook, a Minnesota resident who noticed the gap and drafted language for lawmakers. His persistence helped turn a historical oddity into legislation. Senator Amy Klobuchar then led the effort in the Senate and described the bill as a way to affirm the eagle as a symbol of freedom and strength.

The law changes little in practice, but it closes a gap between the country’s symbols and its statutes. After Biden’s signature, the bald eagle is no longer just the bird Americans assumed it was. It is now the bird the law says it is.