What is the most American animal?

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — In 1782, a lesser-known Founding Father, Charles Thomson, slapped a shield onto a bald eagle with talons full of arrows and olive branches and called it the Great Seal of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin remarked that the bird in the illustration looked more like a turkey, a “bird of courage” he said he far preferred to the “rank coward” eagle. But the US needed a Great Seal after three previous attempts (including a violent illustration from the Old Testament suggested by Franklin) had failed to capture the essence of the very young country. The bald eagle, which was numerous in the US then and a splendid, intimidating bird of prey, worked fine.

No one involved in the choice had any idea what America and its rich catalog of fauna would look like on its 250th birthday. Can the hastily chosen symbol of 13 ex-colonies still stand in for the United States today? Could some other animal do a better job?

“When animals become symbols, they often cease being animals,” said Janet M. Davis, professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Instead, they become “ideological repositories,” representations of nebulous values like freedom and strength, players in our national mythology.

So the bald eagle evolved into an abstraction, to be overlaid on pocket change, the corner mailbox, or the first moon landing. It is the emblem of the unexamined American experience, or even the unreal one: This week the president posted an AI image of a nonexistent new White House decoration, a bald eagle in shiny gold hanging from a balcony.

What about the real animals of the United States, the ones who have shared a habitat with the American people for the past 250 years? I asked experts — ecologists, wildlife biologists, experts in American history and identity — to nominate a most American animal for our times. Some refused, citing the abundant diversity of American life, both wild and human. The rest had to decide what “most American” meant: an ideal essence? A pragmatic survivor? Something that’s been here all along, or a newcomer that’s persisted and flourished?

Which animal had the best case?

A word for the incumbent

Thomson’s choice of the bald eagle followed a tradition of powerful or would-be powerful nations and empires using birds of prey as symbols. The eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, was a North American original, with a range that covered all 13 original colonies and which now spans the entire Lower 48 and extends to Alaska.

Jack E. Davis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and environmental history professor at the University of Florida, said the eagle still represents us well.

“Yes, it’s a scavenger and fish robber, but we aren’t perfect ourselves,” said Davis, who also wrote a book on baldies. “And what does the bald eagle say about 2026: It’s proven to be a survivor, and so have we — so far.”

For most of the first two centuries of America’s existence, the living bird was much less beloved than the emblem. The bald eagle may have stood for martial prowess — in the Civil War, the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment carried a live eagle mascot named Old Abe into dozens of battles against the Confederate Army, and historians say he lived through the experience — but the American public almost totally eradicated the first most American animal, considering them nuisances and even murderers, Davis said.

“Because we believed for so long that bald eagles were flying away with livestock and human babies, killing a bald eagle was considered a public service,” he said. (Bald eagles typically can’t lift more than four pounds.)

In the early days of the Republic, it’s estimated there were between 100,000 to 300,000 “balds” across the country. After almost two centuries of humans hunting them and stealing their habitats, while poisoning them on purpose or accidentally with egg-ruining pesticide, there were 417 nesting pairs left. In the decades since the Bicentennial, the species has pulled off a remarkable recovery, with the help of the Endangered Species Act and a national ban on the pesticide DDT; their population is now over 300,000, and the bald eagles’ success can be seen as a testament of American persistence and redemption, Davis said.

The Department of the Interior called the bird’s comeback “the greatest triumph in the history of American wildlife conservation.”

“The soaring bald eagle stands as a living monument to American resilience, stewardship, and our shared commitment to protecting our natural heritage,” the department said in a statement.

A rival official titleholder

For all its heraldic ubiquity, the bald eagle was not formally named America’s national bird until 2024. That put it eight years behind the national mammal, the bison, which was enshrined during the final year of the Obama administration.

The prize-winning documentarian Ken Burns, through a spokesperson, declared the bison his choice for the most American animal. Unlike the eagle, the bison only ranged into the mountainous edges of the Colonies, but their prodigious size and unimaginable numbers — tens of millions of them covering the Great Plains — made them a vivid symbol of the growing nation’s continent-sized ambitions.

Pre-colonization, Native American tribes in the West and Midwest hunted bison for food, fur and tools made from their bones, but many tribes maintained a respectful relationship with them, too, and considered them sacred. Once colonists entered the picture, the bison, much like the bald eagle, was driven to near extinction, its population dropping to a few hundred by the end of the 19th century.

The bison’s return has been slower than the bald eagle’s, and has needed more active help. The billionaire animal lover Ted Turner helped bison rebound, growing a herd of 45,000 bison across six states. (Turner was CNN’s founder. He also co-founded a restaurant chain that serves various bison dishes.) They’ve been reintroduced to the West and Great Plains; now they’ve recovered to the point that tourists at Yellowstone National Park ignore warnings and are gored by the beasts when they get too close.

Big, strong animals for a big, strong country

The bison, with its huge bludgeoning head and potential one-ton weight, embodies another aspect of how America thinks of itself. Since the United States’ founding, animals have been used as living proof of the country’s dominance, superiority and size.

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson, then ambassador to France, had a 7-foot-tall moose killed in the woods of New Hampshire and shipped its carcass across the Atlantic to a French naturalist who believed life in the New World was “smaller and more degenerate” than in Europe. The moose was used “essentially as a piece of evidence: look how big we grow things here,” said Mackenzie Cooley, an associate professor of history at Hamilton College.

“The moose is the most American animal because we once deployed one as a diplomatic argument about national worth,” she said. “It’s defensiveness and bigness and wanting Europe’s respect, all in one animal.”

In one notable case, an American animal’s domineering size is strictly relative. The Eastern gray squirrel may be a nuisance on its home turf, but Americans see it as a diminutive one. When it hitched a ride to the United Kingdom, though, it became a “symbol of anti-Americanism” by bullying Britain’s smaller and more disease-susceptible red squirrels into decline, said Harriet Ritvo, emeritus professor of environmental history and human-animal studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The American interlopers, nearly twice as heavy as the natives, have gradually replaced them across much of their range.

They’ve become so hated, Ritvo said, that they’re described the same way some Brits used to identify American soldiers in World War II who were stationed in the UK: “Overpaid, oversexed and over here.”

Pests, opportunists and survivors

Maybe the competition to be the most American animal isn’t a popularity contest at all. Almost universally reviled as a pest, thief and plague-bringer, the rat is a harder sell for the title most American animal. But rats are who we really are, said urban ecologist Michael Parsons.

“Every iconic American animal is just a fantasy: the eagle’s flight, the strength of the grizzly, the nobility of big cats,” he said. “But we aren’t any of those things! Rats represent the America we actually built — densely populated, wasteful, too busy for hygiene.” (“I don’t think Americans are distinctive in that way,” Ritvo said, of the overlapping nastiness between humans and rats.)

The skulking, yapping coyote would probably not be most Americans’ choice for their animal stand-in, either. But it has adapted better than almost any other species to mass onslaught of humans into its habitat. The coyote lives in 49 states, like the bald eagle, and it was a significant figure in Native American folklore, alternately helpful and malevolent.

It’s the rare wild species that has enlarged its range even as the United States cleared and plowed and paved the continent, despite repeated attempts to cull its growing population, said Erim Gómez, assistant professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana. Freed from pressure from their physically stronger, ecologically more sensitive gray wolf cousins, coyotes have claimed new opportunities from coast to coast, even in the biggest cities.

“Coyotes have persisted and expanded despite more than a century of intensive efforts to eradicate them,” Gómez said. “Today, the USDA Wildlife Services partnered with states to provide professional coyote removal. Even with these efforts, coyotes have been difficult to eliminate.”

Raccoons, also a regular target of pest control projects, are similar survivors, clever and dexterous and enterprising enough to live off human trash. Graphically distinct, the omnivorous bandits can live almost anywhere in the US, from deep forests to crowded cities on both coasts.

“I think if we have anything like a nuclear winter, where everything above 20 pounds goes extinct, I think they’re going to be in charge, because they have hands,” Ritvo said.

Newcomers claim their place

One of the most numerous and widespread creatures in the country wasn’t here at all when the Founders were debating graphic design. European starlings got a late start in the United States — the socialite Eugene Schieffelin was said to have released 100 of them in New York’s Central Park in 1890 just as winter was starting to thaw, although there were other starling releases in that era, and the story that Schieffelin wanted all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to appear in the New World is likely exaggerated. Whatever first got them going, the stubby, speckled interlopers thrived, and now there are anywhere from 80 to 200 million of them in the US. (There are an estimated 110 million northern cardinals, by comparison.)

“As America is a land of immigrants, the starling is in many ways the ultimate American animal,” said Charles Siebert, a professor of practice at New York University-Abu Dhabi and wildlife journalist.

But the country’s immigrant history is the reason there cannot be one most American animal, said Yale University wildlife and land conservation professor Nyeema Harris. No one animal can represent the diversity of experience and culture that has shaped American identity, she said.

“It’s America because we have bald eagles and timber rattlesnakes and black-footed ferrets. All are valued, all are needed, and all are celebrations of America,” she said.

Overlooked, dreaded or fading away

There are some other less-sung animals that helped make America: Davis nominated the pig, a non-native species whose mistreatment in the early days of the pork industry inspired a movement to improve conditions for animals and workers in slaughterhouses and whose fictional avatars, like Wilbur, have endeared people to animal causes. Horses evolved in North America, went extinct here, then returned to partner with Native Americans and European pioneers alike, and to roam free on their own as wild mustangs. Beavers were the original American engineers, transforming landscapes and dictating the flow of freshwater before their thick fur, targeted by trappers, became the foundation of trade and finance.

The fire ant, an arrival from South America, is another excellent architect, though not as well-liked as the beaver. But its society is complex and capable of building rafts and towers, said David Hu, an engineering professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies bioengineering.

“It is also aggressive with a sting and bite,” Hu said.

Rattlesnakes may not seem like a flattering comparison, either, but they’re “extremely American,” Ritvo said. They live all over the country, for one, and the founders frequently deployed the reptiles in insignia, propaganda and political cartoons to promote colonial unity and American sovereignty in the years before the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Franklin drew a chopped-up snake to discourage colonial disunity in his “JOIN, OR DIE” cartoon. The coiled rattler on the Gadsden flag was an emblem of American independence; it’s since been adopted by libertarians, Tea Party Republicans and conservatives hostile to government overreach or any perceived threats to their view of American supremacy.

Americans tend to wax nostalgic about bygone, “simpler” times, so a disappearing species might be the most fitting emblem of an America many miss: Fireflies, as American as summer camp and backyard barbeques, are in decline, said Daniel Kronauer, a professor at The Rockefeller University who studies insect societies. Theirs is not a “dramatic extinction, but a gradual dimming, noticed first in backyards and fields, and measured in the gut feeling that there are fewer lights out there than there used to be.” Perhaps it’s more American to ignore encroaching darkness than stare into the abyss.

The most American animal is …

Eagles and coyotes and fireflies all make compelling contenders for most American animal, but I keep returning to Franklin’s turkey. It has a less dramatic narrative than some other contenders; its bald, dwarfish head and dangling wattle don’t scream “majesty.” It was hunted by colonists, too, for food rather than sport or profit, and its survival is also a conservation success story. (Rebounding from a low of 30,000 in the 1900s to 7 million today is still impressive, said Cooley.)

Turkeys were tamed and domesticated by Indigenous people and colonists, till they were the mainstay of the Thanksgiving dinner. Plenty of European countries have their own native eagles. But no other continent has a bird quite as bizarre or delicious as a turkey.

For Franklin, “the turkey is the anti-aristocratic bird — democracy with feathers,” said Cooley. “Franklin’s preference is really a populist argument: the eagle is the heraldic emblem of Old World empire … and the turkey is the homely, useful, everyman bird. Choosing the turkey is choosing the republic over the crown.”

Might the turkey be the most apt avatar for America 250 years on? It’s a living rebuke of European supremacy, like Jefferson’s sacrificial moose. And like bison, turkeys can aggress overfamiliar humans and launch frightening attacks when needed, usually aided by their faithful flocks. They’ve adapted to life in the most densely packed cities in the country, like raccoons, rats and coyotes. They’re a literal centerpiece of a secular American cultural tradition and the story we tell about early Americans, like the regal bald eagle. Except turkeys are twice as heavy as bald eagles, and more resplendent and colorful — a plump Tom’s face is even dipped in red, white and blue.

“The turkey is most American,” Cooley said, “precisely because we’ve never quite agreed on whether to laugh at it or salute it.”

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