When I was in Madison last year I was delighted to learn that Wisconsin’s Capital City had an Official Bird.
The lawn flamingo.
This designation stemming from the infamous incident many years ago when UW students planted more than a thousand lawn flamingos on Bascom Hill.
Good one Badgers.
As it happens, the hottest and most consequential public policy debate in Floriduh so far this century is the question of whether the flamingo (not of the lawn variety) ought to replace the mocking bird as the Official Sunshine State Fowl.
So I want to take this opportunity to relate my favorite Floriduh flamingo story.
For a long time, Flamingos were considered an exotic species here in the Sunshine State. If you saw one, chances are it either escaped from a zoo or you were looking at a rosette spoonbill with a nose job.
But Florida used to be lousy with ‘em.
Right up till the 19th century, when plum hunters all but wiped them out so ladies in New York City could sport fashionable hats ablaze with gorgeous pink feathers.
Then developers came along and commenced to drain and fill a lot of the wetlands that flamingos liked to stand in on one leg.
At some point the surviving preening pink pullets pulled up stakes and decamped for the Caribbean.
Which is why the Audubon Florida was delighted to announce that more than 100 flamingos were counted in the state in 2024. “We are thrilled that there are flamingos that have remained in Florida after being blown here in 2023 by Hurricane Idalia.”
It being an ill wind indeed that blows nobody no good.
But to return to my favorite Floriduh flamingo story.
It goes back to 1932, when Miami’s Hialeah race track imported a bunch of flamingos from Cuba and moved them into a pond in the middle of the race track.
The next day, the flamingos were gone. They’d pulled up stakes and flew back to Cuba.
Hell, as migrants who voluntarily returned to their native land flamingos should qualify as the Official Bird Of Donald Trump.
But the folks at Hialeah were persistent. They kept importing flamingos (some accounts say they clipped their wings to make ‘en stay put). Suffice it to say that, eventually, the birds decided to hang around.
Damon Runyon would have been proud.
Thus the hit TV show Miami Vice was able to include perky Hialeah flamingos in its opening credits. And Audubon Florida designated the race track a flamingo sanctuary.
Hardly a manly bird
All that said, I am not officially lining up on the side of the Flamingo For State Bird Contingent.
Even though mocking birds are drab and…well…boring.
It’s their coloring, you see.
Pink.
All wrong for a red alpha male state like ours. A state whose politicians have gone to war against all things, um, prideful. All things effeminate. All things…well…pink.
Nah, if it were me, I’d nominate the snowy owl.
My snowy substitute
In honor of the millions of human snowbirds who flock here every winter, fill up our condos and trailer parks, jam our highways, consume our early bird specials and generally make pests of themselves – until comes the spring and they flock back to Michigan, Ohio or wherever the hell they came from.
Plus, snowy owls are really dumb, which perfectly suits the Free State of Floriduh.
How dumb?
One woebegone snowy owl was dumb enough, in 2013, to fly all the way from its Arctic habitat to Little Talbot Island, just south of Fernandina Beach.
My buds and I were camped there at the time. Drinking beer and telling lies and minding our own business.
Next thing you know Little Talbot was crawling with bird watchers, with binocks and long lens cameras and wearing those cringie khaki vests with hundreds of pockets (yeah, I have one of those too. Wanna make somethin’ of it?).
For a change, Floridians were jamming up winter traffic instead of the snowbirds.
And from out on left field
Oh, there is a compromise, if long-shot, candidate out there: The Florida scrub jay.
Which actually can only be found here in Florida and nowhere else in the world.
So its creds are stronger than either the flamingo or the mocking bird.
The Florida scrub jay is a pleasing shade of blue (like the American flag) not pink.
And it’s a tough little bugger that hangs in a decidedly hostile environment (dry, sandy, low oak, fire controlled stretches of wasteland) despite all odds.
“The scrub jay is heavily backed by conservationists because it is Florida’s only exclusively native (endemic) bird species, meaning it is found nowhere else on earth,” says Eva Ries, of Audubon. “Its threatened status also serves as a strong symbol for local environmental protection.”
Alas, the lowly scrub jay hasn’t a hummingbird’s chance in hell of being our state bird. And for a very good reason.
Turns out the only other thing Florida scrub lands are good for is growing sprawling subdivisions on. That’s why the Florida jay is threatened, because it lives rent free right where developers want to put paying customers.
The last thing developers want or need is a a small, personable and threatened Official State Bird getting in the way of their bulldozers.
And there is nothing Floriduh legislators love more than developers. Hell, you’d think builders were an endangered species for all the rights, privileges and regulation breaks the Legislature showers on them session after session.
Sorry, little blue. When the last piece of Floriduh scrub is gone, you may need to migrate to Alabama or some such.
This is Ron Cunningham, and I promise to continue my search for the perfect Official Floriduh Bird. No matter where it leads me.
FreeGNV 