Post Bulletin

By John Molseed

Dec. 30—WABASHA, Minn. — The bald eagle is on the United States' national seal. However, until Christmas Eve, it wasn't on the books as the national bird.

On Monday, Dec. 30, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar joined a standing-room-only crowd at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha to mark the legislation she sponsored making the designation official.

In a rare display of unity from Congress, the bill designating the bald eagle as the national bird passed unanimously with bipartisan support. It was signed Tuesday, Dec. 24, by President Joe Biden.

"That doesn't happen on many things," Klobuchar told the crowd.

Klobuchar and center leaders thanked Preston Cook, co-chair of the National Bird Initiative for the National Eagle Center and longtime eagle enthusiast and collector who spurred the effort. Cook is a collector of eagle art and artifacts who donated a collection of more than 40,000 cultural items from his personal collection to the National Eagle Center.

Klobuchar thanked Republican Congressman Brad Finstad for his support of the legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

"There's a reason Minnesotans were leading this legislation," Klobuchar said in a short interview following the ceremony. "It's not a fluke there's now a national spotlight on the National Eagle Center."

She also acknowledged Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, for working with her in the Senate to bring Republicans on board the initiative in the chamber.

Klobuchar said one small obstacle she and other sponsors of the bill faced was the impression that the eagle already was designated the national bird.

Echoing Cook's campaign, Klobuchar noted that the bison is the national mammal and the rose is the national flower. It was time to make the eagle's designation official.

Ed Minnema, executive director of the National Eagle Center, called the legislation a correction to a "242-year-old oversight." He was referring to the official adoption of a national seal in 1882 that features the bird.

Wabasha Mayor Emily Durand thanked Klobuchar for her efforts and Cook for his relentlessness and support of the center.

Klobuchar, Minnema, Cook and others posed with an ambassador bird, Angel. The 25-year-old raptor was found as a fledgling in 1999 with a broken wing. Angel is unable to fly and has been at the center for learning purposes because she would not be able to survive in the wild.

Former executive director Rolf Thompson, who also attended the event, recalled traveling to Wabasha and seeing a bald eagle in person for the first time when he was a student studying ornithology in the 1970s. At that time, bald eagles were on the brink of extinction. The population was threatened by habitat loss and use of the pesticide DDT, which caused eggshell thinning and hurt eagles' ability to reproduce.

Despite those pressures, the open waters on the Mississippi River adjacent to Wabasha and tree-lined bluffs gave some of the remaining birds food and habitat. That makes Wabasha a fitting home for the National Eagle Center, Thompson said.

Today, more than 300,000 raptors live in the U.S. with more than 70,000 nesting pairs of birds. Of those nesting pairs, about 10,000 of them live in Minnesota. The state is second to Alaska for most nesting pairs of eagles in the U.S.

Klobuchar said she knows the cooperative nature of this piece of legislation probably won't carry over into Congress in 2025, but it will serve as a reminder that some things can bring people together across political aisles.

"I've always been committed to working with others and finding common ground," she said.