Mark Lane: Florida’s state bird debate may alight again
As the Florida Legislature gets ready to begin its yearly session, legislators once more face the critical question of why we have such a boring official state bird. As the person who wrote the book on Florida’s puzzling array of state symbols, I feel I must weigh in.
Florida’s official state bird since 1927 has been the mockingbird. The blah, basic, look-at-what-landed-in-the-feeder mockingbird. The same state bird four other states have designated as their bird.
Why? In a state that’s aflutter with all kinds of distinctive, beautiful and hard-to-find-anywhere-else birds, this designation sends an odd message: Nothing to see here. Which is why bills to change the state bird designation keep popping up session after session.
Bills to designate the scrub-jay as the state bird died in committee without a vote in the last session, the session before that, and in 2016. Now, scrub-jay has landed again.
The scrub-jay, it should be noted, is the only bird found solely in Florida. If you want to see one, you need to travel down here. Which is something you should do. I go to Lyonia Preserve, about an hour’s drive from my house, if I want to look at one.
A scrub-jay’s call is unmusical compared to the mockingbird’s ― it sounds like a clock being wound ― but scrub-jays are pretty, bright blue and white, and friendly. They are a regular Mr.-Bluebird-on-my-shoulder bird. And sadly, they’re in short supply. They’ve been on the federal threatened species list since 1987.
But all past efforts to honor the scrub-jay, Florida’s very own bird and no one else’s, have run afoul, strangely enough, of gun politics. Former National Rifle Association president and formidable gun-rights lobbyist Marion Hammer took it as cause to protect the mockingbird’s status. And when Hammer hammers an issue, Republican legislators obey.
Hammer took on the issue the customary way ― she went negative. She described the bird as “lazy.” Charged that it has “a welfare mentality.” Complained that it eats the eggs of other birds and “that’s criminal conduct; that’s robbery and murder.” She stopped short of calling it a socialist, but that wasn’t necessary. Scrub-jay bills always died.
But this year has a new twist because another bird has alighted. State Sen. Alexis Calatayud, R-Miami, filed a bill to make the flamingo the state bird (SB 918). The bill also has a House companion (HB 753).
The flamingo may or may not be native ― it’s a matter of debate ― but they certainly like it here. Recent storms have redistributed them to new parts of the state. Plus, it’s the bird most associated with Florida. Just look at all those postcards and state-map placemats, not to mention the plastic yard flamingos. Remember the opening credits of “Miami Vice?” Plus, it’s the symbol of one of the state’s most revered institutions, the Florida Lottery.
As a political matter, the flamingo also has fewer natural enemies than the scrub-jay. Development interests have been apprehensive about past scrub-jay bills. They were concerned that a threatened bird that needs a threatened habitat ― palmetto scrubs ― could be weaponized by environmentalists to protect the bird and the scrub lands it requires. The result might be that somewhere in Florida, a new gas station or you-store-it place might get blocked. That’s not a risk your average legislator would be willing to take.
So maybe the flamingo bills offer a way out of the ongoing state bird debate.
Really, we are quite the bird-land down here, and people should appreciate that. Having a drab state bird discourages people from looking in the sky to see what’s here. But like the state pie, which took 18 years of on-and-off debate before the obvious choice, key lime pie, was declared to be our pie, these vital decisions about state identity take time to resolve.
Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist and author of “Roaring Reptiles, Bountiful Citrus, and Neon Pies: An Unofficial Guide to Florida’s Official Symbols.” His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mark Lane: Florida’s state bird debate may alight again
