What is the national bird?

The national bird of the United States is the bald eagle. The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) was placed at the center of the Great Seal of the United States by the Continental Congress on June 20, 1782 after a six-year design process and was the country's de facto national bird from that point. Public Law 118-313, signed by President Joe Biden on December 24, 2024, formally designated the bald eagle as the national bird of the United States by statute, making the long-standing tradition official law.

The bald eagle was chosen for its association with strength, courage, freedom, and long life, and because it was native only to North America. The bird is found across Canada, the United States (including Alaska, where the largest concentration lives), and northern Mexico, and it has been observed nesting in every U.S. state except Hawaii. Adults have a brown body, white head and tail, yellow beak and legs, and a wingspan of six to eight feet. Bald eagles can live 20 to 30 years in the wild and have lived over 50 years in captivity. They are not actually bald; the name comes from the older English word piebald, meaning white-headed.

Benjamin Franklin in a January 26, 1784 letter to his daughter Sarah Bache famously called the bald eagle a Bird of bad moral Character (because it scavenges and steals fish from other birds) and joked that he preferred the wild turkey, but his preference was personal and not the official position of Congress.

The bald eagle population in the lower 48 states collapsed during the twentieth century to as few as 487 nesting pairs by 1963 due to habitat loss, hunting, and the pesticide DDT, which thinned eggshells. The species was protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940 (16 U.S.C. sections 668 through 668d) and listed as endangered in 1967 and again under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. After DDT was banned in 1972 and conservation programs were implemented, the population recovered, and the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list on June 28, 2007.

There are now over 71,000 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states, plus much larger populations in Alaska and Canada. The bald eagle remains protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which prohibits taking eagles or their parts (eggs, feathers, nests) without a permit; enrolled members of federally recognized Native American tribes can obtain feathers through the National Eagle Repository for religious and cultural use.