In 1970, Princess Anne Ruffled D.C. Feathers by Dissing America’s National Bird

Visiting with her brother, then-Prince Charles, she said the eagle was a ‘bad choice’

By Frederic J. Frommer

When Queen Camilla makes the rounds this week with King Charles III during their visit to the United States., odds are that she will make a better impression than his traveling companion in 1970, when then-Prince Charles’s 19-year-old sister, Princess Anne, had some choice words about America’s national bird.

The trouble started when Charles, then 21, on his first official visit to the United States, noticed a carved replica of a bald eagle in a visit to Capitol Hill.

Photo by Harald Hofer on Unsplash

“Everybody at the Capitol was stumped,” the New York Times wrote in a “headliners” feature story on July 19, 1970. “Why, asked Prince Charles, had the bald eagle been chosen as the national bird of the United States? His outspoken sister, Princess Anne, said she thought it had been ‘rather a bad choice.’”

Anne made her editorial comment after the royals were informed that Ben Franklin’s preference was for the turkey. The famous Founding Father had critiqued the bald eagle as a “bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly.” Franklin railed on eagles for chasing other birds of prey and stealing the fish they had caught. (As The Peregrine Fund observed with a little less judgment, “the fact is that Bald Eagles, like all living things, do what they must to survive.”)

Not everyone in Washington appreciated the unsolicited input from the young visitor from the mother country.

“Something about our national bird — and nobody’s quite sure what — was bugging our royal visitors from Great Britain,” David R. Boldt wrote in a front-page Washington Post story headlined, “The Princess and the Eagle.”

“The royal pair’s remarks were but the latest in a long series of troubles, from pesticides to unrelenting critics, that has been plaguing the eagle, not, perhaps, unlike the nation it symbolizes,” Boldt wrote, two years before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the pesticide DDT — and less than two weeks after ​President Richard Nixon announced plans to create the EPA.

Perhaps reflecting American’s defensiveness on behalf of the bald eagle, Boldt added: “It isn’t known whether any prominent Americans have been heard recently to make snide remarks about the British lion, to imply, perhaps, that its tongue-lapping expression on the British coat of arms is a trifle silly looking, not to mention the prancing unicorn that faces the lion on the coat of arms.”

The head bird keeper at the National Zoo told The Post that the bald eagle was in fact a “very stately” bird.

The bald eagle has long been known as America’s bird, including a prominent display on U.S. passports and dollar bills, but because of a “historical oversight,” it wasn’t formally recognized as one until December 2024, when President Joe Biden signed legislation to do so in his final weeks in office.

Back in 1970, the British embassy in Washington took a hard pass on royal PR damage control for the princess’s comment, explaining that the reason for it was “locked in her heart.” News stories described her as “bored” by the trip to the states.

Charles, who today is recognized as an environmentalist, displayed some of that passion during that visit to Washington, when he toured the Patuxent Center for Wildlife Research and Propagation of Endangered Animal Species.

“He poked his finger and made noises at a white whooping crane, one of six of the rare birds he observed at close range in a wire pen, and flapped his arms in front of a huge black Andean condor,” the Post wrote.

“He’s said more to that one crane than he’s said to the press in all the time he’s been here,” one of the reporters who followed Charles observed.

Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book on ‘70s baseball.

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