I think you've got that exactly right, Barry. Nothing wrong with having the kids choose, by the way -- maybe opens their eyes to what's out there at an impressionable age.

By personal experience, I can say that this approach works. Going back to 1951 -- well, to be perfectly honest, a few years earlier than that -- we got bird coloring-books in one of our grade-school classes. This was in the Middle West, so we had "eastern" species, about ten if I remember. Really I think they were chosen so you could use as many colors as possible from your basic Crayola coloring set. I remember that the really striking birds were class favorites, like Baltimore Oriole, Blue Jay, Scarlet Tanager, Red-headed Woodpecker, Northern Cardinal, Eastern Bluebird and, to be sure, American Goldfinch. Third-graders in Spangle and Pe Ell in 1951 must have had similar tastes.

The results you get in any poll, though, will be almost completely dependent on the composition of the body of individuals who get to vote -- just as you say. That reminds me of something the late Carter Brown used to say. As longtime director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (D.C.) a lot of strongly held citizen opinions came his way, and he became quite adroit at navigating the hazards of cultural politics. People often confronted him with the familiar statement "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like." To which Carter would nod and reply, "Yes, but you haven't got it quite right. What you mean to say is 'I like what I know.'" Thus Steller's Jay, as Wayne points out, trumps Varied Thrush because it is more familiar to more people.

Varied Thrush is a great candidate for state bird, even if it might be more than a little tone deaf to encourage the state legislature to open up this issue at the present time, as many have said. But maybe Varied Thrush could be the Tweeters mascot for now, if that is the consensus, and wait for sunnier times to see if there was any interest in introducing a bill to promote it to state bird, after an educational campaign?

As an aside, I don't see why, though, a bird that spends part of its time away from Washington should be disqualified for consideration on those grounds alone. How many Tweeters subscribers would apply to themselves a restriction that imposed a permanent loss of citizenship if they ever set foot outside the state of their birth? And hey, don't we pride ourselves on being a mobile society?

Facetious analogies aside, summarily tossing out swifts, swallows, and tyrant-flycatchers amounts to bias against a whole bunch of birds that catch insects on the wing. Should they be second-class citizens in Washington just because we have seasons up here?

Hal Opperman
Medina, Washington
hal at catharus.net

On Feb 8, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Barry Ulman wrote:

> I think the reason why the Goldfinch is Washington's state bird, and why Goldfinch, Robin, Cardinal, etc. appear so frequently as state birds is that they were chosen by kids. I believe that state governments went to the schools to get votes from the students on what should be their state bird(s). Therefore, we have our commonest and most conspicuous species elected. Now if the state governments went to the birders instead to determine state birds (my choice), we'd probably have much more interesting and representative species chosen for each state.