State birds of all 50 states

The cardinal, the meadowlark and the mockingbird

The 50 state birds cover only 27 species, because a few birds are hugely popular. The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, all in the East and the Midwest, from Illinois to North Carolina. The western meadowlark, whose song carries a long way over open grassland, belongs to six western and Plains states. The northern mockingbird, famous for copying other birds and even sirens, is the choice of five southern states. The American robin, the American goldfinch and the black-capped chickadee are each shared by two or three.

Popularity explains part of this. These are common, colorful or musical birds that most people could recognize in their own yard. But it was also first come, first served, and sometimes not even that. Washington schoolchildren chose the meadowlark in 1928, only to find that several other states had it already. A women’s club vote in 1931 and a new schoolchildren’s vote in 1951 eventually gave Washington the goldfinch.

Chosen in classrooms

In many states the people who chose the bird were children. Campaigns to give every state a bird spread in the 1920s, and they were often led by Audubon societies, bird clubs and women’s clubs. Asking schoolchildren to vote was a way to teach them about birds at the same time.

The numbers could be large. More than 121,000 Kansas students took part in the vote that picked the western meadowlark, and the Kansas statute still says the bird was chosen because schoolchildren preferred it. Montana’s 1931 law names the meadowlark after a children’s vote in 1930. In Michigan, close to 200,000 people voted in a 1929 poll run by the Michigan Audubon Society, and the robin narrowly beat the black-capped chickadee. West Virginia’s 1949 vote gave the cardinal a lead of more than 11,000 votes over ten rivals.

Women’s clubs did the lobbying in other states. The Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs asked for the mockingbird, which the Legislature adopted in 1927. In Arkansas, legislators reportedly treated the women’s clubs’ mockingbird proposal as a joke at first, and it passed only after speeches about how useful the bird was to farmers.

When states chose

Of the 49 states in our records, 37 adopted their bird in the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s. Kentucky was first, naming the cardinal in 1926. When New Jersey’s state senator Dryden Kuser introduced his goldfinch bill in 1935, he pointed out that 44 states already had a bird; senators greeted the first reading by whistling. Later adoptions include Minnesota’s common loon in 1961, Louisiana’s brown pelican in 1966, New York’s eastern bluebird in 1970 and, last of all, Hawaii’s nēnē in 1988.

The unusual ones

Not every state bird is a songbird. Delaware chose the Blue Hen chicken, after a story that Revolutionary War soldiers from Kent County carried fighting gamecocks descended from a famous blue hen. Rhode Island’s bird is a breed of chicken, the Rhode Island Red. Several states picked game birds: the ruffed grouse in Pennsylvania, the willow ptarmigan in Alaska and the ring-necked pheasant in South Dakota, an Asian bird first successfully released there in 1908.

Utah’s state bird is the California gull, which honors the 1848 “Miracle of the Gulls,” when gulls ate swarms of crickets that were destroying the pioneers’ crops. The Utah law simply says “sea gull.” North Carolina briefly had a different bird: in 1933 the Legislature named the Carolina chickadee, then repealed the resolution about a week later, partly because lawmakers disliked its nickname, the tomtit. The cardinal took its place in 1943.

Find a bird

Click any bird above for the state’s page, with how to recognize it and where to see it. If you want to test yourself, try the state birds quiz.