Florida’s State Bird
No one had a greater interest in state birds than Mrs. Katherine B. Tippetts. She campaigned for their adoption across the nation.
Mrs. Tippetts was president of the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs and founder of the St. Petersburg Audubon Society. So it was natural that she would take a special interest in promoting a bird to represent Florida. In fact, she campaigned for a Florida state bird for about eight years.
The St. Petersburg Audubon Society sponsored the state bird vote, with school children casting the ballots. Candidates ranged from the tiny hummingbird to the pelican. One boys’ school championed the vulture, or “buzzard.” They had been building airplanes and studying this bird in the process.
But the winner was the mockingbird, which was adopted on April 22, 1927. In Florida Bird Life, 1932, Arthur Howell wrote,
“The mockingbird is probably the most widely distributed and best-known bird in Florida. . . . The song of the Mocker is easily the most prominent and best loved of southern bird voices-a cheery, rollicking, voluble medley of great variety, interspersed with excellent imitations of many other birds’ songs or call notes.”
In Alexander Sprunt, Jr.’s Florida Bird Life, 1954, the author wrote,
“No part of the State is without it, and its individualism appeals to many. Vigorous in the defense of its territory, having little fear of man or anything else, superb in vocal accomplishment, it is a general favorite throughout its really tremendous range. Probably one of the most striking facts about it in Florida is the way the birds of the Bok Tower area seized upon and reproduced exactly the song of the nightingales brought there some years ago by Mr. Bok. The European importations [nightingales are native to Europe] last very long, but their songs lived after them in the repertoire of many Polk County Mockers.”
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