The state birds of all 50 states, with their songs

The most popular state bird is the Northern Cardinal, chosen by seven states, followed by the Western Meadowlark with six and the Northern Mockingbird with five. States started picking birds in the 1920s, and by 1970 every state had one. Thirty-two states share their bird with at least one other state. Two states picked domestic chickens, one picked a goose found nowhere else on Earth, and one never officially picked a bird at all. The table below has all 50 plus Washington, DC, with the year each was adopted.

All 50 state birds, plus DC

Years are the year of adoption as listed by Wikipedia. Birds with a page on this site are linked so you can hear them; the shared birds are counted in the next section.

A few names need translating. Alabama's Yellowhammer is the Northern Flicker. Iowa and New Jersey call theirs the Eastern Goldfinch and Washington calls its the Willow Goldfinch; all three are the American Goldfinch. Maine's law says only "chickadee" without naming a species, and the Black-capped Chickadee is the accepted reading. Louisiana's bird is listed as the Eastern Brown Pelican, a subspecies of the Brown Pelican. Oregon proclaimed the Western Meadowlark in 1927 but never wrote it into law until 2017, when it became the official state songbird. Pennsylvania has never adopted a state bird; its 1931 Ruffed Grouse is a state game bird.

The popular choices

Of the 50 states, 32 share their bird with somebody else. Eight species account for 30 states between them.

The odd ones

Two chickens

Delaware's Blue Hen is a blue strain of American gamecock, not a wild bird. The name goes back to 1775: by the popular story, soldiers of a Kent County company in the 1st Delaware Regiment carried blue fighting chickens with them, and the birds' reputation rubbed off on the men, who became known as the Blue Hen's Chickens. The state made it official on April 14, 1939. The University of Delaware's teams are the Blue Hens, and the university keeps a flock of about forty birds descended from stock donated in the 1960s.

Rhode Island's bird is the Rhode Island Red, a farm chicken developed in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the late 1800s from Malay-type birds crossed with brown Leghorns. It was bred for both meat and eggs, and since about 1940 mainly for eggs; a traditional hen lays 200 to 300 brown eggs a year. The breed was standardized in 1898 and got a monument in Little Compton in 1954, the same year the state adopted it. Neither chicken will turn up in a sound identifier, and neither has a page here.

Hawaii's goose

The Nene is a goose found only in the Hawaiian Islands, and its name comes from its soft call. Around 25,000 lived there when Captain Cook arrived in 1778. Hunting and introduced mongooses, pigs and cats cut that to 30 birds by 1952, five years before Hawaii named it the state bird in 1957. Federal protection came in 1958, followed by captive breeding and releases, and by 2022 the count had climbed back to about 3,862, which still makes it the rarest goose in the world. It lives on the ground in shrubland, grassland, coastal dunes and lava plains on Maui, Kauai, Molokai and the island of Hawaii.

The state with no state bird

Pennsylvania designated the Ruffed Grouse as its state game bird in 1931 and left it at that. Most lists print the grouse anyway, and so does the table above.

Which state birds you can hear at home

Most state birds were chosen because people already knew them from the yard, which means a lot of the list is available from your porch.

• East of the Great Plains: the Northern Cardinal is a year-round resident from Maine to Minnesota to Texas, so Illinois, Ohio and Virginia's bird is also Georgia's and New York's backyard bird. The American Robin breeds across nearly all of North America. The Black-capped Chickadee, Eastern Bluebird, American Goldfinch, Carolina Wren, Brown Thrasher, Baltimore Oriole and Wood Thrush are all reachable in the eastern half of the country.
• The plains and the West: the Western Meadowlark sings from fence posts across western and central North America west of the Great Lakes, and the Mountain Bluebird, Lark Bunting and Scissor-tailed Flycatcher hold down the open country.
• The South: the Northern Mockingbird is nearly unavoidable. The Cactus Wren, Greater Roadrunner and California Quail cover the Southwest and California.
• Harder to get: the Willow Ptarmigan means a trip to Alaska, the Common Loon needs a northern lake in summer, and the Nene needs a plane ticket.

In Warble, each state's album of 100 birds has a card for its state bird. Catching all the wild ones is a long project; catching your own is usually a morning.

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Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.