Within the eager night gentle, a Bald Eagle skirted the speeding present, dropped down inside inches, and reached in for a fish. “It’s dinnertime,” mentioned Preston Cook dinner, watching from the patio of his condominium in Wabasha, Minnesota. It was early September 2020. Cook dinner and I sat sipping bourbon because the Mississippi River sprinted previous simply toes away. On the Wisconsin aspect, a protected floodplain sheltered favourite Bald Eagle nesting bushes—cottonwoods with sturdy, lookout-high branches.
The river by no means froze right here and the fishing was all the time good. Eagles remained energetic year-round in sizable numbers, though some would start migrating in a few months. Cook dinner would depart, too. The eagles would fly south to Missouri or past to the Gulf Coast. Cook dinner would drive west to San Francisco, the place he and his spouse, Donna, lived the opposite half of the yr. Come April, he’d return, as would the birds. “I like being again right here with the eagles,” he mentioned.
Cook dinner’s method is well mannered and exact. Tall and match, he’s younger-wanting than his 70-plus years, but sufficiently old to recollect when the wanton degradation of the atmosphere made seeing Bald Eagles within the wild an unlikely prospect. After a nationwide ethical reckoning with the pure world, their inhabitants staged a comeback for the ages. “The eagles I see out right here inform me how properly we’re doing collectively,” he mentioned.
Cook dinner reached for the bottle of Eagle Uncommon to freshen our glasses, every etched with a Bald Eagle. If Cook dinner noticed one thing with the good-looking raptor on it, he needed to have it. Over greater than half a century, he has amassed an unlimited assortment of eagle memorabilia—from medals, flags, and comedian books to a life-size statue of Surprise Girl in her basic eagle bodice—some 40,000 gadgets in all.
Nonetheless tempting, evaluating him to a crackpot hoarder can be a mistaken assumption. He retains informational notes on almost each merchandise, together with such gems as an authenticated doc signed by Abraham Lincoln and painted by hand plates produced from engravings for John James Audubon’s seminal work, The Birds of America.
He additionally makes use of his obsessive pursuit to serve the general public good. Cook dinner is the kind to see our half-empty bottle of bourbon as half full, and he feels hopeful concerning the Bald Eagle’s future. But as two alpha species—people and eagles—broaden their area, he acknowledges the chances of renewed battle. Considering that risk, Cook dinner envisions his assortment inspiring empathy for the fowl’s continued prosperity. That’s why he was in Wabasha.
Minnesota has the biggest nesting inhabitants of Bald Eagles within the contiguous United States, and Wabasha is located alongside a migratory flyway in prime eagle habitat. The riverfront city of roughly 2,500 individuals can also be residence to the National Eagle Center, which hosts programming and displays on the biology of Bald Eagles, assisted by non-releasable feathered ambassadors: Angel, Was’aka, Perseus, and Latsch. Cook dinner moved throughout the nation in order that his cultural artifacts may enrich guests’ experiences with the reside birds.
I used to be writing a book on the Bald Eagle and had come to Wabasha at Cook dinner’s invitation to discover his assortment. It’s a repository of a sophisticated, almost 250-year historical past during which we in the end needed to save the Bald Eagle from ourselves—our weapons, chemical compounds, and different damaging propensities. We had accomplished that, however Cook dinner believed there was a spot within the historical past that wanted to be closed to totally reconcile our relationship with our avian affiliate.
“You recognize, most individuals suppose the Bald Eagle is the nationwide fowl,” he mentioned, corking the bottle. Books, newspapers, and loads of consultants made that declare. Even authorities web sites asserted as a lot. “However they’re unsuitable.” We each knew that no Congress or president had ever bestowed the consideration on a species, and neither of us was conscious of any efforts to right this longstanding oversight. We had a nationwide mammal, the bison; a nationwide tree, the oak; and a nationwide flower, the rose. Absolutely the Bald Eagle merited the identical degree of recognition. A congressional vote, we agreed, may usher in a palliative second of bipartisanship at a time when the nation was deeply divided. “We’d like this,” Cook dinner insisted. And I knew he wasn’t an individual to lose sight of a aim.
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ook grew up in a middle-class household of 5 in Evanston, Illinois. In Could 1966, when he was 19, he and a pal went to see the movie A Thousand Clowns. Cook dinner had simply spent 13 months hitchhiking throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Center East, and far had impressed him. However what modified his life was a single line that the film’s most important character, Murray Burns, utters when his 10-year-old nephew complains after he buys an eagle decoration he can scarcely afford. “Nick,” Burns explains, “you’ll be able to’t have too many eagles.” That struck a chord with Cook dinner, who had a pure inclination for gathering however lacked a spotlight. After the film, he resolved to begin gathering eagle objects.
The primary had been issued to him 5 months later when he was drafted into the military. His costume uniform bore brass buttons stamped with the Bald Eagle on the Nice Seal of america. When his hitch was up in 1968, he lower them off and began his assortment. He started including prints, pins, statues, army medals, and postcards he picked up at flea markets, storage gross sales, and vintage outlets.
Not like Burns, Cook dinner had constructed a profitable business actual property enterprise and will afford his ardour. Someday within the Nineteen Nineties, he took his searches to the web: “1000’s of things crammed my display screen,” he says, “and the deluge commenced.” He started averaging 2,000 purchases a yr.
After I visited his condominium, the partitions of the doorway hallway displayed eagle-associated film posters, World Struggle I broadsides, and a Newark Eagles jersey signed by Negro Leagues’ pitching ace Leon Day. Others held engravings by Nineteenth-century ornithologist John Gould and 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby. Commanding atop the fireside mantle was Liberty Eagle, a peculiar, 40-inch-tall ceramic sculpture that stood humanlike, sporting a cascading red-and-white-striped skirt and a blue-and-white star-spangled brassiere.
“Sure, you can have too many eagles,” Donna instructed him as his acquisitions grew. Preston agreed to an “eagle-free zone.” “The bed room,” he instructed me, “stays off limits.”
No such zone existed on the previous American Legion Corridor in Wabasha, the place I first encountered the gathering. 5 years after an 18-wheeler hauled it up from California, its 40,000 gadgets crowding 4,000 sq. toes delivered to thoughts Lucretius’s resonant phrase: “Numbers in quantity past quantity.” I couldn’t see the partitions for all that held on them. Tight pathways wriggled previous dozens of tobacco canisters, a whole bunch of cups and plates, hundreds of marketing campaign pins, numerous postcards, and the biggest privately owned eagle stamp assortment. There have been belts, buckles, boots, brooches, strolling canes, and a slot machine. There have been weapons, knives, cigarette lighters, cowboy boots, and 54 hood ornaments, dust-free and gleaming. Cook dinner had even put in stylized rest room seats within the restrooms, painted with white feathered heads and yellow eyes staring up at you. All these objects had been the embodiment of not solely Cook dinner’s fixation but additionally a nation’s.
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hen the Continental Congress adopted the Nice Seal in 1782, that includes a Bald Eagle clutching objects of peace and warfare, the species achieved a excessive perch in nationwide iconography. Haliaeetus leucocephalus lives solely in North America, and to the individuals of a younger republic, the stalwart raptor exhibited energy, braveness, and most significantly freedom. Its mesmeric bearing made it a popular cultural and patriotic image, showing on flagstaffs, army insignia, U.S. foreign money, enterprise logos, chinaware, and finally bumper stickers, tote baggage, motorcycle jackets, and naturally bourbon bottles.
Historical past shouldn’t be with out paradox, nonetheless. Whereas People idolized the emblematic Bald Eagle, they loathed the residing fowl. They sought to eradicate the formidably taloned raptor for preying on livestock and business fish. By the point Congress handed the Bald Eagle Safety Act of 1940, the inhabitants was spiraling towards the identical destiny because the extinct Passenger Pigeon. 5 years later, DDT went on the open market.
The yr Cook dinner noticed A Thousand Clowns, there weren’t a thousand pairs of Bald Eagles nesting within the Decrease 48. Regardless of Rachel Carson’s warning in Silent Spring about DDT’s lethal climb up the meals chain, the industry-vaunted pesticide was nonetheless extensively used. Concurrently, the postwar inhabitants growth consumed nice swaths of wilderness, and runoff polluted two-thirds of the nation’s waters.
After 20 million individuals rallied on the primary Earth Day in April 1970, Washington adopted a sequence of landmark initiatives. In 1972, the newly established Environmental Safety Company banned the home sale of DDT, and Congress handed the Clear Water Act. The next yr, a revamped Endangered Species Act grew to become regulation, with its flagship ward, the Bald Eagle, proclaiming its advantage. On the nation’s bicentennial, wildlife biologists launched restoration packages that yielded spectacular returns. In revitalized waters, aquatic vegetation returned. Fish and fish-eating mammals returned. Ospreys and pelicans, hit exhausting by DDT, returned. By the late Nineteen Nineties, Bald Eagles returned, too.
Cook dinner, then in his 50s, was struck by the irony that he had by no means seen a Bald Eagle within the wild. So he traveled to Alaska—the place the inhabitants had remained secure regardless of DDT—for the annual competition on the Chilkat Bald Eagle Protect. The protect was recognized for internet hosting what’s believed to be the biggest convocation of Bald Eagles on this planet; nonetheless, he was shocked to see hundreds of them.
Again in California, Cook dinner’s newfound appreciation for the species moved him to broaden the gathering past symbolic representations. He acquired ornithological texts, paintings by Roger Tory Peterson and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and a whole set of Audubon’s double-elephant eagle prints. He bought a whole bunch of pictures of eagles, raptor facilities, and restoration-era hack towers for releasing captive-bred birds. Finally, his library held round 2,000 eagle-related books.
Cook dinner’s rising curiosity within the residing fowl additionally led him to hitch the boards of Level Reyes Hen Observatory (now Level Blue Conservation Science), close to San Francisco, and the American Bald Eagle Basis, host of the Chilkat competition, in Alaska. When he returned to the occasion in 2003, he gained an public sale to launch a rehabilitated eagle. The fowl’s weight and talon grip on his ungloved forearm and the burst of air from its wings left him awestruck. Later, somebody instructed Cook dinner that he had stood immobile together with his arm raised lengthy after the eagle lifted skyward.
This time he returned residence decided to share his life’s labor with others, hoping they’d discover their very own connections to nature. The gathering, he believed, would have the best influence if displayed the place guests would see and study reside birds. That’s when he found the Nationwide Eagle Middle in Wabasha. Though it operated out of an previous retail retailer and barroom, guests may see 50 or extra eagles within the winter months a block away on the river, the place the middle was getting ready to interrupt floor on a 14,000-square-foot facility. It could characteristic an auditorium, lecture rooms, a glass-encased aviary, and a spacious out of doors remark deck. Cook dinner knew he had discovered a house for his assortment. “It’s so distinctive and necessary,” board member John Wodele instructed me. “We felt excited and privileged he selected us.”
Three months earlier than the opening in September 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the Bald Eagle. With 11,040 breeding pairs throughout the Decrease 48, the Bald Eagle had grow to be the Endangered Species Act’s first main success story. Some 150 pairs nested round Wabasha, scores in these riverside cottonwoods, up from a single pair within the yr Cook dinner lower the buttons off his uniform.
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s spectacular as the brand new heart was, wants had modified. Cook dinner’s present included a request for a full-time curator and expanded gallery area for exhibiting gadgets pulled from storage, which he relocated to 2 buildings he purchased on Fundamental Avenue. To fund the enhancements, the board launched a capital marketing campaign emphasizing Cook dinner’s assortment. Schoolchildren joined Angel, the middle’s senior eagle ambassador, on a visit to the capitol in St. Paul to assist safe $8 million in state bonding funds.
One of many largest personal donors, pledging $1 million, was the Prairie Island Indian Group, positioned 40 miles upriver. The tribe was notably curious about upgrading the middle’s avian-care facility, which Cook dinner had additionally made a situation of his donation. “For our tribe and tradition, the eagle has particular that means,” Tribal Council President Shelley Buck instructed the Minnesota Star Tribune, as a sacred messenger between the individuals and the Creator.
By the point the growth was accomplished in 2022, the tenacious raptors had pushed their numbers as much as greater than 316,000 birds within the Decrease 48 and an estimated 500,000 continent-wide. The comeback was a tour de power, creating a possibility to show concerning the birds and the advantages of residing peaceably with nature. Simply because the proliferation of nest cams early within the twenty first century invited tens of millions into the intimate world of Bald Eagle households, Cook dinner’s eagle artifacts launched individuals to the deep historic and ecological connections between people and the fowl. The historical past of 1 was inseparable from the opposite, and the well-being of each was tied to the well being of a shared atmosphere. As Al Batt, a board member of the American Bald Eagle Basis, sees it, by combining reside eagles and pure historical past with Cook dinner’s displays, the middle facilitates an understanding of the significance of “leaving the world a greater place” for future generations.
Former heart CEO Meg Gammage-Tucker says a useful attribute of the gathering is the numerous narratives that attraction to a cross-section of tourists and encourage an appreciation of wildlife conservation. There’s something for nearly everyone: leisure hunters, scouts, liberals, conservatives, environmentalists, Native individuals, and others. When she was director, no group touched her greater than the veterans who, after inspecting the uniform of a full colonel (often known as a fowl colonel) bearing 15 eagle insignias, regarded on the reside eagles and mentioned, in her phrases, “That is the image for what I did for the nation.”
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oon after our night spent sipping bourbon, Cook dinner dedicated himself to creating the Bald Eagle the nationwide fowl. He had reached out to Senator Dianne Feinstein a decade earlier, asking for clarification concerning the fowl’s official standing. She confirmed that no laws designated it as such, however felt the Nice Seal “successfully” validated its standing. Now not glad with that clarification, Cook dinner took the concept of launching a marketing campaign to Gammage-Tucker. She supplied the Nationwide Eagle Middle because the institutional residence of an effort they named the Nationwide Hen Initiative. Wodele and I got here aboard to co-chair it with Cook dinner.
Cook dinner discovered a helpful mannequin within the effort that persuaded Congress to call the American bison the nationwide mammal in 2016, arguing that it was a species of great cultural, financial, and ecological worth that had returned from the brink of extinction. For the Bald Eagle, nationwide fowl designation can be a rightful honor and capstone for the safety of a species that survived centuries of persecution whereas ably symbolizing the nation.
Cook dinner drafted a “quite simple” invoice, linking the Bald Eagle to nationwide id, Indigenous spirituality, and the nation’s historical past. He then funded a lobbyist, who secured endorsements from zoos, wildlife organizations, Alaskan Native villages, and veterans teams. An early endorsement got here from the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes, at present representing almost 134,000 tribal members. Its govt director, Scott Vele, praised the initiative as a gesture of “respect” for the “oldest and bravest animal,” giving “acknowledgment to our ancestors, our brothers, our sisters, our life.”
Gammage-Tucker reached out to U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, and Congressman Brad Finstad, a Republican, each of Minnesota, about sponsoring a invoice. After touring the middle with Gammage-Tucker and Cook dinner, Finstad mentioned he’d gladly help. Klobuchar, a longtime supporter of the middle, signed on as co-sponsor, as did Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. “For greater than 240 years,” Lummis mentioned, “the Bald Eagle has been synonymous with American values.”
In Congress, the winged exemplar of nationwide advantage and conservation achievement appealed to each side of the aisle. The Senate handed the invoice unanimously this previous July, effecting a second of welcome bipartisanship towards the backdrop of a contentious presidential marketing campaign. As of press time, the invoice appeared poised to sail via the Home of Representatives and to the president’s desk.
The invoice’s passage can be well timed. It comes as Bald Eagles are contending with mounting dangers, maybe the best since Cook dinner started his assortment 50 years in the past. The inhabitants is feeling the results of habitat loss, automobile strikes, powerline electrocutions, and toxins that go up the meals chain. A 2022 research discovered that nearly half of 1,210 eagles examined throughout 38 states exhibited indicators of acute lead poisoning. Local weather change looms massive, too. Warming and rising waters will seemingly diminish fish shares and habitat and heighten competitors amongst species. Excessive climate occasions, resembling hurricanes, are already killing birds and destroying nests.
Cook dinner’s assortment strikes on the coronary heart of our difficult relationship with the Bald Eagle, illuminating the duality of human nature—our virtues and our flaws—within the shared world of this outstanding fowl. But from this historical past emerges hope. It reveals our potential to rise above our failings and the eagle’s steadfastness in enduring them, reaffirming its benefit as a flagship species of each nature and nation.
A model of this piece initially ran within the Winter 2024 problem as “You Can’t Have Too Many Eagles.” To obtain our print journal, grow to be a member by making a donation today.
