Birding

US State Birds by Popularity

September 10, 2026 by Kai Pflug 3 Comments

Unsurprisingly, not all bird species are equally popular in the United States. One way to measure this is by looking at how often they have been chosen as official state birds.

The undisputed champion is the Northern Cardinal, selected by seven states. It is followed by the Western Meadowlark (six states) and the Northern Mockingbird (five states). After that, the field gets much more fragmented, with familiar species such as bluebirds, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Brown Thrasher, Black-capped Chickadee, and Common Loon appearing in multiple states.

The pattern is fairly clear: Americans tend to prefer familiar neighbors over obscure specialists. A bird does not need to be rare or restricted to the state to become a symbol of it. It helps much more if people see it in their backyard. The populists are winning.

This also explains why some birds have struggled to gain political fame. The California Gull, for example, is the official bird of only one state — and despite its name, that state is not California but Utah.

Even an ambitious campaign by MAAGA (Make American Gulls Great Again) has so far failed to convince other states that gulls deserve more recognition.

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Written by Kai Pflug
Kai has lived in Shanghai for 22 years. He only started birding after moving to China, so he is far more familiar with Chinese birds than the ones back in his native Germany. As a birder, he considers himself strictly average and tries to make up for it with photography, which he shares on a separate website. Alas, most of the photos are pretty average as well. He hopes that few clients of his consulting firm—focused on China’s chemical industry—ever find this blog, as it might raise questions about his professional priorities. Much of his time is spent either editing posts for 10,000 Birds or cleaning the litter boxes of his numerous indoor cats. He occasionally considers writing a piece comparing the two activities.