The idea of naming official state birds grew out of the first great American environmental movement. This began late in the 19th century and continued well into the 20th. It numbered among its achievements the founding of the national forest system and the creation of laws protecting songbirds from capture or killing. The campaign for naming state birds was a sort of PR operation designed to get people, especially young people, emotionally involved with birds.
Twenty-eight different birds have been honored as official state birds. Four, besides the California gull, are themselves named after states, but all of these were named for the states that subsequently honored them. California’s state bird is the California quail. The uniqueness of that state’s avifauna provided several choices. The California thrasher, which lives only in California and Baja California, would have made another good one.
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This is a typical committee name. The academics in this group seem to have a bias against names that are needlessly descriptive, apt, or colorful. However, since they feel obliged to provide at least one adjective for every species, they have compiled a list of bland, colorless, all-purpose words that can be combined with any noun to produce a bird name. Their favorite adjectives are “eastern,” “western,” “northern,” and “southern.” If none of those seems ordinary enough, they fall back on “common” and “American.”
The meadowlark is the second most popular state bird. It dominates the Great Plains as the choice of Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota, and then hops the mountains to reign as the official bird of Oregon. Of course, we have two meadowlarks in North America. In this part of the country, we see mainly the eastern. Out on the plains, the western would be the usual species.
Louisiana, bordered to the west, north, and east by mockingbird states, looked to its southern coast and picked the brown pelican as its emblematic bird. Before the banning of DDT, pelicans had nearly disappeared from the Louisiana coasts, so the Bayou State faced the grim possibility of becoming the first state to extirpate its state bird. Fortunately, pelicans have been making a comeback and can once again be found on the Louisiana shore.
