In the keen evening light, a Bald Eagle skirted the rushing current, dropped down within inches, and reached in for a fish. “It’s dinnertime,” said Preston Cook, watching from the patio of his condominium in Wabasha, Minnesota. It was early September 2020. Cook and I sat sipping bourbon as the Mississippi River sprinted past just feet away. On the Wisconsin side, a protected floodplain sheltered favorite Bald Eagle nesting trees—cottonwoods with sturdy, lookout-high branches.
The river never froze here and the fishing was always good. Eagles remained active year-round in sizable numbers, although some would begin migrating in a couple of months. Cook would leave, too. The eagles would fly south to Missouri or beyond to the Gulf Coast. Cook would drive west to San Francisco, where he and his wife, Donna, lived the other half of the year. Come April, he’d return, as would the birds. “I like being back here with the eagles,” he said.
Cook’s manner is polite and precise. Tall and fit, he is younger-looking than his 70-plus years, yet old enough to remember when the wanton degradation of the environment made seeing Bald Eagles in the wild an unlikely prospect. After a national moral reckoning with the natural world, their population staged a comeback for the ages. “The eagles I see out here tell me how well we’re doing together,” he said.
Cook reached for the bottle of Eagle Rare to freshen our glasses, each etched with a Bald Eagle. If Cook saw something with the handsome raptor on it, he had to have it. Over more than half a century, he has amassed a vast collection of eagle memorabilia—from medals, flags, and comic books to a life-size statue of Wonder Woman in her classic eagle bodice—some 40,000 items in all.
However tempting, comparing him to a crackpot hoarder would be a mistaken assumption. He keeps informational notes on nearly every item, including such gems as an authenticated document signed by Abraham Lincoln and hand-painted plates produced from engravings for John James Audubon’s seminal work, The Birds of America.
He also uses his obsessive pursuit to serve the public good. Cook is the type to see our half-empty bottle of bourbon as half full, and he feels hopeful about the Bald Eagle’s future. Yet as two alpha species—humans and eagles—expand their domain, he recognizes the odds of renewed conflict. Contemplating that possibility, Cook envisions his collection inspiring empathy for the bird’s continued prosperity. That’s why he was in Wabasha.
Minnesota has the largest nesting population of Bald Eagles in the contiguous United States, and Wabasha is situated along a migratory flyway in prime eagle habitat. The riverfront town of roughly 2,500 people is also home to the National Eagle Center, which hosts programming and exhibits on the biology of Bald Eagles, assisted by non-releasable feathered ambassadors: Angel, Was’aka, Perseus, and Latsch. Cook moved across the country so that his cultural artifacts might enrich visitors’ experiences with the live birds.
I was writing a book on the Bald Eagle and had come to Wabasha at Cook’s invitation to explore his collection. It’s a repository of a complicated, nearly 250-year history in which we ultimately had to save the Bald Eagle from ourselves—our guns, chemicals, and other destructive propensities. We had done that, but Cook believed there was a gap in the history that needed to be closed to fully reconcile our relationship with our avian associate.
“You know, most people think the Bald Eagle is the national bird,” he said, corking the bottle. Books, newspapers, and plenty of experts made that claim. Even government websites asserted as much. “But they’re wrong.” We both knew that no Congress or president had ever bestowed the honor on a species, and neither of us was aware of any efforts to correct this longstanding oversight. We had a national mammal, the bison; a national tree, the oak; and a national flower, the rose. Surely the Bald Eagle merited the same level of recognition. A congressional vote, we agreed, could usher in a palliative moment of bipartisanship at a time when the nation was deeply divided. “We need this,” Cook insisted. And I knew he wasn’t a person to lose sight of a goal.
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ook grew up in a middle-class family of five in Evanston, Illinois. In May 1966, when he was 19, he and a friend went to see the film A Thousand Clowns. Cook had just spent 13 months hitchhiking across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and much had inspired him. But what changed his life was a single line that the movie’s main character, Murray Burns, utters when his 10-year-old nephew complains after he buys an eagle ornament he can scarcely afford. “Nick,” Burns explains, “you can’t have too many eagles.” That struck a chord with Cook, who had a natural inclination for collecting but lacked a focus. After the movie, he resolved to start collecting eagle objects.
The first were issued to him five months later when he was drafted into the army. His dress 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 cut them off and started his collection. He began adding prints, pins, statues, military medals, and postcards he picked up at flea markets, garage sales, and antique shops.
Unlike Burns, Cook had built a successful commercial real estate business and could afford his passion. Sometime in the 1990s, he took his searches to the internet: “Thousands of items filled my screen,” he says, “and the deluge commenced.” He began averaging 2,000 purchases a year.
When I visited his condominium, the walls of the entrance hallway displayed eagle-related movie posters, World War I broadsides, and a Newark Eagles jersey signed by Negro Leagues’ pitching ace Leon Day. Others held engravings by 19th-century ornithologist John Gould and 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby. Commanding atop the fireplace mantle was Liberty Eagle, a peculiar, 40-inch-tall ceramic sculpture that stood humanlike, wearing a cascading red-and-white-striped skirt and a blue-and-white star-spangled brassiere.
“Yes, you can have too many eagles,” Donna told him as his acquisitions grew. Preston agreed to an “eagle-free zone.” “The bedroom,” he told me, “remains off limits.”
No such zone existed at the old American Legion Hall in Wabasha, where I first encountered the collection. Five years after an 18-wheeler hauled it up from California, its 40,000 items crowding 4,000 square feet brought to mind Lucretius’s resonant phrase: “Numbers in number beyond number.” I couldn’t see the walls for all that hung on them. Tight pathways wriggled past dozens of tobacco canisters, hundreds of cups and plates, thousands of campaign pins, countless postcards, and the largest privately owned eagle stamp collection. There were belts, buckles, boots, brooches, walking canes, and a slot machine. There were guns, knives, cigarette lighters, cowboy boots, and 54 hood ornaments, dust-free and gleaming. Cook had even installed stylized toilet seats in the restrooms, painted with white feathered heads and yellow eyes staring up at you. All these objects were the embodiment of not only Cook’s fixation but also a nation’s.
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hen the Continental Congress adopted the Great Seal in 1782, featuring a Bald Eagle clutching objects of peace and war, the species achieved a high perch in national iconography. Haliaeetus leucocephalus lives only in North America, and to the people of a young republic, the stalwart raptor exhibited strength, courage, and most importantly freedom. Its mesmeric bearing made it a favored cultural and patriotic symbol, appearing on flagstaffs, military insignia, U.S. currency, business logos, chinaware, and eventually bumper stickers, tote bags, motorcycle jackets, and of course bourbon bottles.
History is not without paradox, however. While Americans idolized the emblematic Bald Eagle, they loathed the living bird. They sought to eradicate the formidably taloned raptor for preying on livestock and commercial fish. By the time Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940, the population was spiraling toward the same fate as the extinct Passenger Pigeon. Five years later, DDT went on the open market.
The year Cook saw A Thousand Clowns, there weren’t a thousand pairs of Bald Eagles nesting in the Lower 48. Despite Rachel Carson’s warning in Silent Spring about DDT’s deadly climb up the food chain, the industry-vaunted pesticide was still widely used. Simultaneously, the postwar population boom consumed great swaths of wilderness, and runoff polluted two-thirds of the nation’s waters.
After 20 million people rallied on the first Earth Day in April 1970, Washington adopted a series of landmark initiatives. In 1972, the newly established Environmental Protection Agency banned the domestic sale of DDT, and Congress passed the Clean Water Act. The following year, a revamped Endangered Species Act became law, with its flagship ward, the Bald Eagle, proclaiming its virtue. On the nation’s bicentennial, wildlife biologists introduced restoration programs that yielded impressive returns. In revitalized waters, aquatic vegetation returned. Fish and fish-eating mammals returned. Ospreys and pelicans, hit hard by DDT, returned. By the late 1990s, Bald Eagles returned, too.
Cook, then in his 50s, was struck by the irony that he had never seen a Bald Eagle in the wild. So he traveled to Alaska—where the population had remained stable despite DDT—for the annual festival at the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. The preserve was known for hosting what’s believed to be the largest convocation of Bald Eagles in the world; still, he was stunned to see thousands of them.
Back in California, Cook’s newfound appreciation for the species moved him to expand the collection beyond symbolic representations. He acquired ornithological texts, artwork by Roger Tory Peterson and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and a complete set of Audubon’s double-elephant eagle prints. He purchased hundreds of photographs of eagles, raptor centers, and restoration-era hack towers for releasing captive-bred birds. Ultimately, his library held around 2,000 eagle-related books.
Cook’s growing interest in the living bird also led him to join the boards of Point Reyes Bird Observatory (now Point Blue Conservation Science), near San Francisco, and the American Bald Eagle Foundation, host of the Chilkat festival, in Alaska. When he returned to the event in 2003, he won an auction to release a rehabilitated eagle. The bird’s weight and talon grip on his ungloved forearm and the burst of air from its wings left him awestruck. Later, someone told Cook that he had stood motionless with his arm raised long after the eagle lifted skyward.
This time he returned home determined to share his life’s labor with others, hoping they would find their own connections to nature. The collection, he believed, would have the greatest impact if displayed where visitors would see and learn about live birds. That’s when he discovered the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. Although it operated out of an old retail store and barroom, visitors could see 50 or more eagles in the winter months a block away at the river, where the center was preparing to break ground on a 14,000-square-foot facility. It would feature an auditorium, classrooms, a glass-encased aviary, and a spacious outdoor observation deck. Cook knew he had found a home for his collection. “It’s so unique and important,” board member John Wodele told me. “We felt excited and privileged he chose us.”
Three months before the opening in September 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the Bald Eagle. With 11,040 breeding pairs across the Lower 48, the Bald Eagle had become the Endangered Species Act’s first major success story. Some 150 pairs nested around Wabasha, scores in those riverside cottonwoods, up from a single pair in the year Cook cut the buttons off his uniform.
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s impressive as the new center was, needs had changed. Cook’s gift included a request for a full-time curator and expanded gallery space for exhibiting items pulled from storage, which he relocated to two buildings he bought on Main Street. To fund the improvements, the board launched a capital campaign emphasizing Cook’s collection. Schoolchildren joined Angel, the center’s senior eagle ambassador, on a trip to the capitol in St. Paul to help secure $8 million in state bonding funds.
One of the largest private donors, pledging $1 million, was the Prairie Island Indian Community, located 40 miles upriver. The tribe was particularly interested in upgrading the center’s avian-care facility, which Cook had also made a condition of his donation. “For our tribe and culture, the eagle has special meaning,” Tribal Council President Shelley Buck told the Minnesota Star Tribune, as a sacred messenger between the people and the Creator.
By the time the expansion was completed in 2022, the tenacious raptors had pushed their numbers up to more than 316,000 birds in the Lower 48 and an estimated 500,000 continent-wide. The comeback was a tour de force, creating an opportunity to teach about the birds and the benefits of living peaceably with nature. Just as the proliferation of nest cams early in the 21st century invited millions into the intimate world of Bald Eagle families, Cook’s eagle artifacts introduced people to the deep historical and ecological connections between humans and the bird. The history of one was inseparable from the other, and the well-being of both was tied to the health of a shared environment. As Al Batt, a board member of the American Bald Eagle Foundation, sees it, by combining live eagles and natural history with Cook’s exhibits, the center facilitates an understanding of the importance of “leaving the world a better place” for future generations.
Former center CEO Meg Gammage-Tucker says an invaluable attribute of the collection is the many narratives that appeal to a cross-section of visitors and inspire an appreciation of wildlife conservation. There is something for just about everybody: recreational hunters, scouts, liberals, conservatives, environmentalists, Native people, and others. When she was director, no group touched her more than the veterans who, after inspecting the uniform of a full colonel (known as a bird colonel) bearing 15 eagle insignias, looked at the live eagles and said, in her words, “This is the symbol for what I did for the country.”
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oon after our evening spent sipping bourbon, Cook committed himself to making the Bald Eagle the national bird. He had reached out to Senator Dianne Feinstein a decade earlier, asking for clarification about the bird’s official status. She confirmed that no legislation designated it as such, but felt the Great Seal “effectively” validated its standing. No longer satisfied with that explanation, Cook took the idea of launching a campaign to Gammage-Tucker. She offered the National Eagle Center as the institutional home of an effort they named the National Bird Initiative. Wodele and I came aboard to co-chair it with Cook.
Cook found a useful model in the effort that persuaded Congress to name the American bison the national mammal in 2016, arguing that it was a species of significant cultural, economic, and ecological value that had returned from the brink of extinction. For the Bald Eagle, national bird designation would be a rightful honor and capstone for the protection of a species that survived centuries of persecution while ably symbolizing the nation.
Cook drafted a “very simple” bill, linking the Bald Eagle to national identity, Indigenous spirituality, and the country’s history. He then funded a lobbyist, who secured endorsements from zoos, wildlife organizations, Alaskan Native villages, and veterans groups. An early endorsement came from the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes, currently representing nearly 134,000 tribal members. Its executive 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, both of Minnesota, about sponsoring a bill. After touring the center with Gammage-Tucker and Cook, Finstad said he’d gladly assist. Klobuchar, a longtime supporter of the center, signed on as co-sponsor, as did Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. “For more than 240 years,” Lummis said, “the Bald Eagle has been synonymous with American values.”
In Congress, the winged exemplar of national virtue and conservation achievement appealed to both sides of the aisle. The Senate passed the bill unanimously this past July, effecting a moment of welcome bipartisanship against the backdrop of a contentious presidential campaign. As of press time, the bill appeared poised to sail through the House of Representatives and to the president’s desk.
The bill’s passage would be timely. It comes as Bald Eagles are contending with mounting risks, perhaps the greatest since Cook began his collection 50 years ago. The population is feeling the effects of habitat loss, car strikes, powerline electrocutions, and toxins that pass up the food chain. A 2022 study found that nearly half of 1,210 eagles tested across 38 states exhibited signs of acute lead poisoning. Climate change looms large, too. Warming and rising waters will likely diminish fish stocks and habitat and heighten competition among species. Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, are already killing birds and destroying nests.
Cook’s collection strikes at the heart of our complicated relationship with the Bald Eagle, illuminating the duality of human nature—our virtues and our flaws—in the shared world of this remarkable bird. Yet from this history emerges hope. It reveals our potential to rise above our failings and the eagle’s steadfastness in enduring them, reaffirming its merit as a flagship species of both nature and nation.
A version of this piece originally ran in the Winter 2024 issue as “You Can’t Have Too Many Eagles.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.
