Every Thanksgiving, I get emails and messages thankful for someone’s intercession in Benjamin Franklin’s Great Seal or national bird choice. Franklin is widely believed to have favored the Wild Turkey over the Bald Eagle on our Great Seal. ‘The turkey‘, they say ‘would have been a terrible choice!’ But Franklin didn’t propose either bird in his Great Seal design and the concept of a ‘national animal’ wasn’t part of public or governmental discourse: in Franklin’s time, wild animals were for
The Raptor Resource Project