The bald eagle has landed in the U.S. code after President Joe Biden signed a bill Tuesday making the predator the official national bird.
Congress passed the measure with unanimous support.
Although the bird of prey is at the center of the Great Seal of the United States, it was never formally recognized as the country’s official bird. Some of the Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — were tasked with creating a national seal but simply couldn’t come to an agreement.
In 1782, a version of the seal with a bald eagle was submitted by Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson and approved. Most Americans are familiar with the seal’s eagle carrying a flag-emblazoned shield holding an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other.
Franklin was historically against the decision, arguing in a letter to his daughter that the bald eagle was “a bird of bad moral character.”
Either way, the U.S. has not had an official bird in the almost 250 years since its founding.
Minnesota resident Preston Cook has long hoped that the eagle would ascend into the U.S. code, even writing a draft a bill and sending it to lawmakers.
Cook described himself as having a lifelong obsession with the bald eagle, and took it upon himself to push for a change when discovering that there was no official U.S. bird. He wrote a simple piece of legislation that would change the code to say that, “The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) is the national bird.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., then led a bipartisan group who brought it to the Senate floor in July. It passed unanimously before sailing through the House last week with no opposition.
Cook told NBC News earlier this month that this is one overlooked piece of history he felt compelled to fix.
“No one has to change anything; it’s just a correction. It is only a correction in history to make things right and makes things the way they should be,” Cook said.
