The bald eagle entered the US code after President Joe Biden signed a bill Tuesday making the eagle the official national bird.
Congress approved the measure with unanimous support.
Although the bird of prey is located at the center of the Great Seal of the United States, it has never been officially 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 reach an agreement.
In 1782, a version of the seal with a bald eagle was submitted by Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thompson and approved. Most Americans know the seal eagle, which bears a shield decorated with the flag and holds an olive branch in one claw 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 United States has not had an official bird in the nearly 250 years since its founding.
Preston Cook, a Minnesota resident, had long hoped the eagle would ascend into American law, so much so that he wrote a draft of a bill and sent it to lawmakers.
Cook described himself as having been obsessed with the bald eagle all his life, and took it upon himself to push for change when he discovered there was no official bird in the United States. He wrote simple legislation that would change the law to say that “the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) is the national bird.”
Then Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., led a bipartisan group that took her to the Senate floor in July. It was approved unanimously before passing through the House of Representatives last week without opposition.
Cook told NBC News earlier this month that this was an overlooked part of history and he felt compelled to fix it.
“Nobody should change anything; it’s just a correction. It’s just a correction of history to make things right and make things the way they should be,” Cook said.
