In the eager night mild, a Bald Eagle skirted the dashing present, dropped down inside inches, and reached in for a fish. “It’s dinnertime,” stated Preston Cook, watching from the patio of his condominium in Wabasha­, Minnesota. It was early September 2020. Cook and I sat sipping bourbon because the Mississippi River sprinted previous simply ft away. On the Wisconsin facet, a protected floodplain sheltered favourite Bald Eagle nesting timber—cottonwoods with sturdy, lookout-high branches.

The river by no means froze right here and the fishing was at all times good. Eagles remained lively year-round in sizable numbers, though some would start migrating in a few months. Cook would go away, too. The eagles would fly south to Missouri or past to the Gulf Coast. Cook would drive west to San Francisco, the place he and his spouse, Donna, lived the opposite half of the 12 months. Come April, he’d return, as would the birds. “I like being back here with the eagles,” he stated. 

Cook’s method is well mannered and exact. Tall and match, he’s younger-­trying 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 here tell me how well we’re doing together,” he stated.


Cook reached for the bottle of Eagle Rare to freshen our glasses, every etched with a Bald Eagle. If Cook 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 Wonder Woman in her basic eagle bodice—some 40,000 gadgets in all.  

However tempting, evaluating him to a crackpot hoarder could be a mistaken assumption. He retains informational notes on practically 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 is the sort to see our half-empty bottle of bourbon as half full, and he feels hopeful concerning the Bald Eagle’s future. Yet as two alpha species­—people and eagles—increase their area, he acknowledges the percentages of renewed battle. Contemplating that chance, Cook envisions his assortment inspiring empathy for the chook’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 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 moved throughout the nation in order that his cultural artifacts may enrich guests’ experiences with the stay birds. 

I used to be writing a e-book on the Bald Eagle and had come to Wabasha at Cook’s invitation to discover his assortment. It’s a repository of a sophisticated, practically 250-year historical past wherein we finally needed to save the Bald Eagle from ourselves—our weapons, chemical compounds, and different harmful propensities. We had performed that, however Cook believed there was a niche within the historical past that wanted to be closed to completely reconcile our relationship with our avian affiliate. 


“You know, most people think the Bald Eagle is the national bird,” he stated, corking the bottle. Books, newspapers, and loads of consultants made that declare. Even authorities web sites asserted as a lot. “But they’re wrong.” We each knew that no Congress or president had ever bestowed the dignity on a species, and neither of us was conscious of any efforts to appropriate this longstanding oversight. We had a nationwide mammal, the bison; a nationwide tree, the oak; and a nationwide flower, the rose. Surely the Bald Eagle merited the identical degree of recognition. A congressional vote, we agreed, might usher in a palliative second of bipartisanship at a time when the nation was deeply divided. “We need this,” Cook insisted. And I knew he wasn’t an individual to lose sight of a objective.

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ook grew up in a middle-class household of 5 in Evanston, Illinois. In May 1966, when he was 19, he and a buddy went to see the movie A Thousand Clowns. Cook had simply spent 13 months hitchhiking throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and far had impressed him. But what modified his life was a single line that the film’s fundamental 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 can’t have too many eagles.” That struck a chord with Cook, who had a pure inclination for amassing however lacked a spotlight. After the film, he resolved to start out amassing eagle objects. 

The first have been issued to him 5 months later when he was drafted into the military. His gown uniform bore brass buttons stamped with the Bald Eagle on the Great Seal of the United States. 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 retailers.  


Unlike Burns, Cook had constructed a profitable business actual property enterprise and will afford his ardour. Sometime within the Nineteen Nineties, he took his searches to the web: “Thousands of items filled my screen,” he says, “and the deluge commenced.” He started averaging 2,000 purchases a 12 months.

When I visited his condominium, the partitions of the doorway hallway displayed eagle-­associated film posters, World War 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 hearth mantle was Liberty Eagle, a peculiar, 40-inch-tall ceramic sculpture that stood humanlike, carrying a cascading red-and-white-striped skirt and a blue-and-white star-spangled brassiere. 

“Yes, you can have too many eagles,” Donna advised him as his acquisitions grew. Preston agreed to an “eagle-free zone.” “The bedroom,” he advised me, “remains off limits.” 

No such zone existed on the outdated American Legion Hall in Wabasha, the place I first encountered the gathering. Five years after an 18-wheeler hauled it up from California, its ­40,000 gadgets crowding 4,000 sq. ft delivered to thoughts Lucretius’s resonant phrase: “Numbers in number beyond number.” I couldn’t see the partitions for all that held on them. Tight pathways wriggled previous dozens of tobacco canisters, a whole lot of cups and plates, 1000’s 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 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 have been the embodiment of not solely Cook’s fixation but in addition a nation’s.


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hen the Continental Congress adopted the Great 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 power, braveness, and most significantly freedom. Its mesmeric bearing made it a well-liked cultural and patriotic image, showing on flagstaffs, army insignia, U.S. foreign money, enterprise logos, chinaware, and ultimately bumper stickers, tote baggage, motor­cycle jackets, and naturally bourbon bottles.

History shouldn’t be with out paradox, nonetheless. While Americans idolized the emblematic Bald Eagle, they loathed the dwelling chook. They sought to eradicate the formidably taloned raptor for preying on livestock and business fish. By the time Congress handed the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940, the inhabitants was spiraling towards the identical destiny because the extinct Passenger Pigeon. Five years later, DDT went on the open market.

The 12 months Cook noticed A Thousand Clowns, there weren’t a thousand pairs of Bald Eagles nesting within the Lower 48. Despite Rachel Carson’s warning in Silent Spring about DDT’s lethal climb up the meals chain, the industry-vaunted pesticide was nonetheless broadly used. Simultaneously, the postwar inhabitants increase 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 Protection Agency banned the home sale of DDT, and Congress handed the Clean Water Act. The following 12 months, a revamped Endangered Species Act turned regulation, with its flagship ward, the Bald Eagle, proclaiming its advantage. On the nation’s bicentennial, wildlife biologists launched restoration applications 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, 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 pageant on the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. The protect was recognized for internet hosting what’s believed to be the biggest convocation of Bald Eagles on the planet; nonetheless, he was surprised to see 1000’s of them. 


Back in California, Cook’s newfound appreciation for the species moved him to increase the gathering past symbolic representations. He acquired ornithological texts, art work by Roger Tory Peterson and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and an entire set of Audubon’s double-elephant eagle prints. He bought a whole lot of pictures of eagles, raptor facilities, and restoration-era hack towers for releasing captive-bred birds. Ultimately, his library held round 2,000 eagle-related books.

Cook’s rising curiosity within the dwelling chook additionally led him to affix the boards of Point Reyes Bird Observatory (now Point Blue Conservation Science), close to San Francisco, and the American Bald Eagle Foundation, host of the Chilkat pageant, in Alaska. When he returned to the occasion in 2003, he gained an public sale to launch a rehabilitated eagle. The chook’s weight and talon grip on his ungloved forearm and the burst of air from its wings left him awestruck. Later, somebody advised Cook that he had stood immobile along 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 assortment, he believed, would have the best affect if displayed the place guests would see and find out about stay birds. That’s when he found the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. Although it operated out of an outdated retail retailer and barroom, guests might see 50 or extra eagles within the winter months a block away on the river, the place the middle was making ready to interrupt floor on a 14,000-square-foot facility. It would characteristic an auditorium, lecture rooms, a glass-encased aviary, and a spacious out of doors remark deck. Cook knew he had discovered a house for his assortment. “It’s so unique and important,” board member John Wodele advised me. “We felt excited and privileged he chose 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 Lower 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 12 months Cook lower the buttons off his uniform. 


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s spectacular as the brand new heart was, wants had modified. Cook’s reward included a request for a full-time curator and expanded gallery house for exhibiting gadgets pulled from storage, which he relocated to 2 buildings he purchased on Main Street. To fund the enhancements, the board launched a capital marketing campaign emphasizing Cook’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 the biggest non-public donors, pledging $1 million, was the Prairie Island Indian Community, situated 40 miles upriver. The tribe was notably serious about upgrading the middle’s avian-care facility, which Cook had additionally made a situation of his donation. “For our tribe and culture, the eagle has special meaning,” Tribal Council President Shelley Buck advised the Minnesota Star Tribune, as a sacred messenger between the individuals and the Creator.


By the time the enlargement was accomplished in 2022, the tenacious raptors had pushed their numbers as much as greater than 316,000 birds within the Lower 48 and an estimated 500,000 continent-wide. The comeback was a tour de drive, creating a chance to show concerning the birds and the advantages of dwelling peaceably with nature. Just because the proliferation of nest cams early within the twenty first century invited thousands and thousands into the intimate world of Bald Eagle households, Cook’s eagle artifacts launched individuals to the deep historic and ecological connections between people and the chook. 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 Foundation, sees it, by combining stay eagles and pure historical past with Cook’s displays, the middle facilitates an understanding of the significance of “leaving the world a better place” for future generations.

Former heart CEO Meg Gammage-Tucker says a useful attribute of the gathering is the numerous narratives that enchantment to a cross-section of holiday makers and encourage an appreciation of wildlife conservation. There is one thing 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 called a chook colonel) bearing 15 eagle insignias, appeared on the stay eagles and stated, in her phrases, “This is the symbol for what I did for the country.” 


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oon after our night spent sipping bourbon, Cook dedicated himself to creating the Bald Eagle the nationwide chook. He had reached out to Senator Dianne Feinstein a decade earlier, asking for clarification concerning the chook’s official standing. She confirmed that no laws designated it as such, however felt the Great Seal “effectively” validated its standing. No longer glad with that clarification, Cook took the concept of launching a marketing campaign to Gammage-Tucker. She supplied the National Eagle Center because the institutional residence of an effort they named the National Bird Initiative. Wodele and I got here aboard to co-chair it with Cook. 

Cook 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 chook designation could be a rightful honor and capstone for the safety of a species that survived centuries of persecution whereas ably symbolizing the nation.

Cook drafted a “very simple” invoice, linking the Bald Eagle to nationwide identification, 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, presently representing practically 134,000 tribal members. Its government 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, Finstad stated 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 more than 240 years,” Lummis stated, “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 in opposition to the backdrop of a contentious presidential marketing campaign. As of press time, the invoice appeared poised to sail by way of the House of Representatives and to the president’s desk. 

The invoice’s passage could be well timed. It comes as Bald Eagles are contending with mounting dangers, maybe the best since Cook started his assortment 50 years in the past. The inhabitants is feeling the consequences of habitat loss, automotive strikes, powerline electrocutions, and toxins that go up the meals chain. A 2022 research discovered that almost half of 1,210 eagles examined throughout 38 states exhibited indicators of acute lead poisoning. Climate change looms giant, too. Warming and rising waters will possible diminish fish shares and habitat and heighten competitors amongst species. Extreme climate occasions, comparable to hurricanes, are already killing birds and destroying nests.


Cook’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 exceptional chook. Yet 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 subject as “You Can’t Have Too Many Eagles.” To obtain our print journal, grow to be a member by making a donation right this moment.

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