For America's 250th birthday, the U.S. Postal Service is releasing special edition stamps featuring one of the nation's icons: the bald eagle.
The stamps unveiled Thursday at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minnesota, showcase the bird across five major life stages, from a fuzzy hatchling to the iconic white-headed adult depicted on the country's seal. They were available for immediate purchase across the United States.
“The fact that we’re seeing the eagles in all different stages of its life, it’s sort of making us look back at the stages of the life of our country,” said Steve Kochersperger, a historian at the Postal Service. “At one time, we were just fuzzy little hatchlings, too.”
The bald eagle has been a national emblem since Congress adopted the Great Seal in 1782, though it wasn't designated the national bird until 2024.
The bird has long symbolized American values like strength, freedom and independence, said Kochersperger. At the top of the food chain, the bald eagle dominates in the sky alone with its impressive wingspan and sharp talons.
Some believe Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be the national bird because the eagle steals food from other birds, but Kochersperger said that's a myth.
There's another reason why it makes a strong American symbol: the bald eagle is a major conservation success story. In the 1960s, eagles became a rare sight in the U.S. because of poisoning by the pesticide DDT.
But that decline was reversed, thanks to a 1972 DDT ban and the bald eagles' listing as an endangered species in 1978.
“The public relations campaign brought greater awareness that, ‘Hey, this is our national symbol, but they may all be gone if we don’t change our ways,’” Kochersperger said. “And that turned out to be very effective.”
In 2007, the bald eagle was removed from the endangered list, and there are now more than 300,000 eagles in the continental United States, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
David Sibley, the Massachusetts-based artist and bird watcher behind the stamp collection, said the conservation story is part of what makes him think of the bald eagle as a symbol.
“Maybe seeing a bald eagle on the stamp as a bird, living its life from nestling to adult, will hopefully make people think about the natural world and how important things like eagles are, not as a symbol but as part of the ecosystem around us,” he said.
Sibley spent nearly a year working on the digital illustrations for the collection. As someone who usually draws life-sized birds, the tiny stamp size was perhaps the biggest challenge, so he chose to focus on the bald eagle’s head to show as much detail as possible.
Postage stamps have long served as a way to celebrate holidays and highlight American culture, but they can also be educational, if you look closely.
“A stamp does not demand your attention, but it rewards it,” Kochersperger said. “A tremendous amount of planning and effort went into producing that tiny little piece of paper.”
