“Various organizations joined with the State Federation of Women’s Clubs in Texas in selecting a State bird. More than 100,000 children added their ballots, and the victor was the Western Mockingbird, which was officially recognized in February, 1927.”
So wrote Katherine B. Tippetts in Nature Magazine, April 1932. Apparently, not much more was recorded about the mockingbird’s adoption.
Still, the mockingbird appears to have captured Texans’ allegiance. In The Bird Life of Texas (1974), Harry C. Oberholser writes,
“Probably no other native perching bird, unless it be the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, is more widely known in Texas than the Mockingbird, official state bird, whose remarkable song and wide distribution make it so conspicuous. Though rare or absent on treeless plains and in deep forests, it is found almost everywhere else . . .”
Texas’ state bird is a reminder that the Lone Star State belongs partly to the South. But what about those treeless plains, deep forests, and arid Trans-Pecos (western) Texas?
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Paperback
