Can i possess an eagle feather

Skip to content. Back To School. Don't Fall For It. Links We Mentioned. Gray DC Bureau. Catch It Kansas. Always on Storm Team Storm Chaser Radar Map. Top Of The Class. Salute the Badge. Military Greetings. Contact Us. That same year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service issued Directors Order 69 instructing all employees to assist in rapid transfer of all available eagle remains and parts to the National Eagle Repository.

If you have an existing eagle mount that predates the Eagle Act , a permit is not necessary, but you may be asked to document the age of the mount. We will contact the National Eagle Repository on your behalf to see if the mount can be used for Native American religious use. If the Repository does not want the eagle mount, you may keep it.

If you have an exhibition permit for the eagle mount issued prior to the moratorium in you may continue to retain your eagle mount as long as your permit is valid. If you permit expires, please contact us. If you do not have a permit for your eagle mount, contact us for assistance. If you wish to donate an old eagle mount, our migratory bird permit office can help you with this issue.

We will need to know if there is currently a permit for the eagle mount, and what kind of institution wishes receive the mount. The recipient of the eagle mount will need an Eagle Exhibition Permit. Eagle Exhibition Permits are only available to zoological parks, scientific societies and museums that are open to the general public and are either established, maintained, and operated as a governmental service or are privately endowed and organized but not operated for profit.

Contact information for assistance with transferring an eagle mount can be found below:. For Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Ohio. The contacts above can help assist with this. Due to the moratorium on issuing Eagle Exhibition Dead permits, we are not able to issue permits for new taxidermied eagle mounts. If you are a qualifying institution wishing to receive a donation of an existing eagle mount, please contact us for assistance. This guidance also applies to institutions wishing to obtain eagle feathers and eggs for educational use.

Several companies make realistic replicas of eagle feathers, parts, and eggs for education use. It is not legal to keep eagles as pets. Eagle are wild animals and cannot be kept as pets or used for commercial purposes. Only federally permitted wildlife rehabilitators and qualifying institutions may house eagles. Only non-releasable eagles may be housed for long-term educational use or in tribal aviaries. There is no permit for personal possession of migratory birds.

Even legally salvaged birds must be taken to an appropriate educational or scientific institution within 6 months of salvage. You can read more about federal taxidermy permits , migratory bird salvage permits , and exhibition permits. When the federal law was passed, bald eagles had nearly vanished from the lower 48 states. Use of the insecticide DDT further decimated eagle populations and by fewer than nesting pairs remained, according to the federal agency.

The newly formed U. Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in , a move that helped start the recovery of bald eagles. When the number of nesting eagles approached 10, in , eagles were removed from the list of threatened and endangered species. In New York state, efforts to restore the bald eagle population from just a handful in resulted in a dramatic turnaround.

Nestling eagles were brought from Alaska starting in Today more than pairs of nesting eagles can be found in the Adirondacks, Hudson Valley and other parts of the state, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.