Bald eagle has recently been officially declared as the national bird of which one among the following countries?

Q: What is the answer to CDS (I) 2025 GK Q117?

C. Correct — C, USA. The bald eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, became the national bird of the United States by an Act signed in December 2024. The text is now in the United States Code at title 36, section 306, and it says only this: the bald eagle is the national bird. What makes the item worth more than a moment is the oddity it turns on. The bird had been the American emblem since the Second Continental Congress placed it on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, and it has appeared on coins, passports and the presidential seal ever since — but for two hundred and forty-two years no law had actually said it was the national bird. The 2024 Act closed that gap, which is exactly why the stem says 'recently'. The species itself is a large sea eagle of North America with a white head and tail on a dark brown body; it was listed as endangered in the 1960s after DDT thinned its eggshells, and recovered well enough to be removed from the endangered list in 2007. (Provisional — pending the official UPSC key.)

(a)China
(b)England
(c)USA
(d)Ireland

Answer

Why

Correct — C, USA. The bald eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, became the national bird of the United States by an Act signed in December 2024. The text is now in the United States Code at title 36, section 306, and it says only this: the bald eagle is the national bird. What makes the item worth more than a moment is the oddity it turns on. The bird had been the American emblem since the Second Continental Congress placed it on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, and it has appeared on coins, passports and the presidential seal ever since — but for two hundred and forty-two years no law had actually said it was the national bird. The 2024 Act closed that gap, which is exactly why the stem says 'recently'. The species itself is a large sea eagle of North America with a white head and tail on a dark brown body; it was listed as endangered in the 1960s after DDT thinned its eggshells, and recovered well enough to be removed from the endangered list in 2007.

Why the others are wrong

(a)China — China has no officially designated national bird. The red-crowned crane has been proposed more than once and has never been formally adopted.
(b)England — There is no statutory national bird of England or of the United Kingdom. A public poll in 2015 chose the robin, which carries no legal standing. The bald eagle is not native to Europe at all.
(d)Ireland — Ireland has no official national bird either; the northern lapwing and the Eurasian curlew are sometimes named informally. Irish white-tailed eagles are a different species, reintroduced from Norway.

Concept

National symbols are usually adopted by law or by proclamation, but they can also grow by long custom and only later be written down. The bald eagle is the standing example: emblem by usage from 1782, national bird by statute only from December 2024. India offers the contrast — the Indian peafowl was declared the national bird by government decision in 1963, and the Bengal tiger the national animal in 1972 when it replaced the lion.

Items that ask about a country's national symbols reward one caution: many countries have no official one at all. Neither England nor Ireland has a legally designated national bird, and China has never adopted one, so three of the four options here fail on that ground before the eagle is even considered. The eagle is also the only bird among the four countries' associations that is identified with the state itself rather than with folk sentiment. The word to watch in the stem is 'officially declared' — it is doing real work, because the informal answer for the United States would have been the same for two centuries.

Key facts

The bald eagle became the national bird of the United States by an Act of December 2024, codified at 36 U.S.C. 306.
It had appeared on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782 without ever being named the national bird by law.
The species, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, is a North American sea eagle with a white head and tail.
It was listed as endangered in the 1960s, largely because of DDT, and was removed from the United States endangered list in 2007.
China, England and Ireland have no officially designated national bird.
India declared the Indian peafowl its national bird in 1963.

Study next

India's national symbols — the peafowl, the tiger, the banyan, the lotus and the Ganges river dolphin — with the years they were adoptedThe Great Seal of the United States and the symbols on itDDT, biomagnification and the recovery of raptor populations after the pesticide was bannedHow the IUCN Red List categories work, and what delisting a species meansNational symbols of neighbouring countries, which recur in CDS and NDA papers

Common traps

Assuming every country has an official national bird; most of the options here do not.
Reading 'recently declared' as meaning the association is new, when the eagle has been the American emblem since 1782.
Confusing the bald eagle with the white-tailed eagle of Europe, a related but different species.

As a symbol-to-country item, or as part of a current-affairs set on what changed in a given year.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
The Indian peafowl was declared the national bird of India in which year?
- (a)1947
- (b)1950
- (c)1963
- (d)1972
Answer(c) 1963 — the peafowl was adopted as the national bird that year; the tiger became the national animal in 1972, replacing the lion.
practice — not a real PYQ
The decline of the bald eagle population in the United States during the twentieth century is most closely associated with which one of the following?
- (a)Oil spills along the Atlantic coast
- (b)The pesticide DDT thinning eggshells
- (c)Loss of habitat to hydroelectric dams
- (d)Introduction of an invasive predator
Answer(b) The pesticide DDT thinning eggshells — the resulting breeding failure drove the endangered listing in the 1960s; the species was delisted in 2007 after recovery.