Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about some birder fussing at a state legislature to change that state’s official bird. Floridians want the Osprey or the endemic Florida Scrub-Jay, Nebraskans have proposed the Sandhill Crane, Oregonians suggest the Spotted Owl, Washingtonians have nominated the Great Blue Heron, Georgians would prefer (get this) the Chicken.
The second most common response: “Sacrilege!” (The most common, of course, is “Don’t bother us, we’re busy.”) How can we just throw off the weight of all that history? How can we second-guess the venerable traditions of the Founders?
It turns out that there’s nothing divinely ordained about The State Bird. And like all human institutions, this one has a history that’s a lot more recent, and a lot more interesting, than we might suspect.
Katherine Bell Tippetts, a transplanted Marylander with a proud pedigree, served a third of a century as president of Florida’s St. Petersburg Audubon Society, the organization she helped found in 1909.
Under her leadership, the Society exercised its influence to have wildlife preserves established, bird protection laws passed, and a state game commission created. And in 1925, Tippetts and her colleagues conducted the election in which Florida’s schoolchildren elected the Northern Mockingbird as the state bird.
Seven years later, Tippetts published an important article in Nature Magazine. The title, I think, is self-explanatory.
Note (if you can read the very small type) that Tippetts here gives her affiliation as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization that in the 1920s and 30s took the lead in encouraging states to select an emblematic bird. As Chairman of the Federation’s conservation division, Tippetts was able to get state Women’s Clubs to distribute ballots to the schools. Sometimes the results were surprising. In the Florida election, for example, she noted that
one boys’ school went solid for the vulture, because they had been building airplanes and studying this bird in the process.
Alabama’s state bird, the Northern Flicker, was selected for more insidious reasons.
It turns out that that choice was made not out of any particular fondness for the bird itself, but because Alabama’s Civil War soldiers were known as “yellowhammers.” The poor brown woodpecker is an underhanded political statement, a sort of feathered bars and stars–which makes sense if you look at its plumage. Similarly (but much less sinisterly), Delaware’s Blue Hen was chosen not because of its prowess as a layer or even its tenderness in the skillet, but rather for the association of the rooster of the breed with the state’s soldiers during the American Revolution.
Pushed hard by the women’s clubs, most of the states appear to have selected their state birds in the late 1920s and 1930s. The process in Nebraska, described by Jon Farrar in his Birding Nebraska, was probably typical:
At the October 1928 Nebraska Federation of Women’s Clubs convention in Kearney, a resolution passed that ‘a bird typical of the prairies and abundant in all parts of the state be chosen by this convention assembled and the result combined with the vote of the school children of the state and interested societies to be presented to the State Legislature for acceptance’.
The Federation prepared a slate of five species for the schoolchildren to vote on; the winner (just as it would be in Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming) was the tuneful Western Meadowlark. The Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union, after some very interesting debate about just what purpose might be served by having a state bird–education, conservation, sentiment–endorsed the choice, and the Unicameral passed a bill that was promptly signed by the governor.
Two states joined the Union a couple of decades after the Women’s Clubs put so much effort into this matter. Hawaii, with its wealth of endemics (fewer and fewer each year, alas), settled on (or maybe for) the Nene, that handsome ground-dwelling goose found nowhere else in the world; Alaska, probably eager to remind “sportsmen” of its many allures, chose the Willow Ptarmigan. What impresses me most is not the selections but their timing: according to that invariably accurate source of infallible wisdom the internet, both jurisdictions selected their avian emblems in 1955, four years before either attained statehood.
A curiosity. But a measure, too, of how successful Katherine Tippetts and her sisters in arms were, and of how important the role of women was in all aspects of birding and nature study in pre-1934 America. By the mid-1950s, if you wanted to be a state, you had to act like one–and that meant having a state bird.
