Thoughts on the Mercenary Ornithology State Birds Post

I am pretty confident at this point that the What The State Birds SHOULD Be post I did a couple years ago will be the most-read thing I ever write.  I'm OK with that; it's had a life far beyond what I expected and as been a lot of fun.

An though it's just a little article, I feel a little paternalistic to the topic of fixing the state bird situation. There's a lot of room in the debate, of course, and a few days ago the folks at Mercenary Ornithology weighed in.  WITH SCIENCE.

Mercenary Ornithology used mathemagics to figure out which bird should be the state bird for each state.  They used some formulas to figure out a bird's Outlier Value, basically how much more likely you are to see a certain bird in one state compared to all others.  The results are great, and much more specific than most of the choices I slopped together. There are blue-winged teal involved now, and red-cockaded woodpeckers and upland sandpipers. It's a much more diverse list, weighted towards state-specific birds, with nary a cardinal in sight.

But it ain't perfect.  What's the problem? Well, at the risk of sounding exactly like old fogey baseball writers railing against the influx of so-called "advanced stats" like WORP and PECOTA: This list ain't got no heart! Where's the human touch? While some of the results of the mechanical approach are perfect, other results range from awkward (a Kentucky warbler for Arkansas?) to depressing (European Starlings shouldn't be a state bird anywhere, even a place as boring as Indiana [j/k Indiana I love you]).

Ya gotta leave some room for debate, and you've got to embrace quirks. Let Rhode Island keep their dumb chicken, it's their thing. Let Maryland keep the oriole...it's a Baltimore Oriole! There's fun in the details, and room for states to pick birds that aren't very common or easily found in their states.

No matter what other lists people come up with, everyone can agree on one thing: the current lineup of state birds is a national shame, and we gotta do something about it.

Birds at Large: Geico Commercial

You think I like this?  You think I want to do this?  Do you think I sit here just waiting for some dumb ad agency to dumbly cram a bunch of random birds into a commercial so I can gallop up on my highest of high horses?

No, I don't.  I have a life, you guys.  I have friends, and a girlfriend, and a dog to walk.  There's baseball on TV.  No, I have to do this.  It's sorta like a superhero.  No, it's exactly like a superhero.  With great power comes great responsibility, right?  I have the power of proper bird identification, and now it's my responsibility to make sure that birds appearing in popular culture do so accurately. It's just what I have to do.  So here it is.

GEICO made a dumb commercial about Taz from Looney Tunes drinking an energy drink and then  spinning around Taz-style and busting up an adjacent commercial shoot for commemorative plates depicting "state birds."  As far as GEICO commercials go, it's not the best.  Being honest, GEICO has a great track record for funny commercials.  Those caveman commercials are masterpieces, I'm not even gonna front.  Compared to the heaps and heaps of garbage that make up television commercials, GIECO stands above.

That said, this Taz ad sucks.  First, Taz doesn't need an energy drink to do the whirlwind thing, he always does that.  Taz should be even MORE bonkers after an energy drink, maybe like, uh, destroying a Midwestern city like a Twister-style tornado.  I don't know.

Secondly, and more importantly for this audience, are the goddamn bird plates.  The voiceover says these are plates that commemorate the 50 states birds in the U.S.  Let's see what we've got.

Let's go from left to right.

• Black-capped Chickadees.  These are the state birds of both Maine and Massachusetts.  Hey, these could really be plates commemorating the state birds of all fifty states!
• Wood Ducks.  Oh, nevermind. Wood Ducks are the state birds of 0 states.  These are not plates commemorating the state birds of all fifty states.
• Northern Cardinal.  Yeah OK.
• Bald Eagle.  Not a state bird, you idiots.
• Tundra Swan.  See above.
• Northern Cardinal.  You got lucky.
• Tufted Titmice.  Ok I think we've done enough here.

Whelp that's all! Thanks everyone! Tip your waitresses.

Put A Bird On It. Any Bird.

The Major League Soccer All-Star Game is going to be held in Portland, Oregon* this year, and they've just released images of the jerseys the players will be wearing.  Portland, OR being Zany Quirky Portland, OR (TM) (c), they stuck a bird on the inside of the shirt, a reference to the Put a Bird On It skit from the tv show Portlandia.

That's all well and good and Portlandians can check the "delightful irreverence" box that's probably required for anything officially done in Portlandia.  But something sticks in my craw.  The MLS release about the jerseys says that the bird on the jersey is a western meadowlark, the state bird of Oregon.  Let's take a closer look.

You've got to be shitting me.  That's not a meadowlark.  It's blatantly not a meadowlark.

Why even bother?  Does it cost more to print the silhouette of a meadowlark instead of that sparrow-type thing?  If you want it to be a meadowlark, make it a meadowlark!  If you don't care, then don't say it's a meadowlark!  Lord.  The stupidity of state birds is something I've discussed at length, but apparently my rantings have not changed anything.  Screw you, Portland, Oregon, and go Sounders.


*In 1845, two dudes with two very-1845 names, Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove, wanted to name their new settlement on the Pacific coast after their respective hometowns.  Lovejoy was from Boston, Massachusetts and Pettygrove was from Portland, Maine, also the beloved hometown of yours truly.  They decided that the only way to fairly choose a name was a best-of-three coin flipping contest.  Francis, using those strong Maine thumbs, flipped a winner, and proudly proclaimed this new site Portland, of the Oregon Territory!  Fast forward to today, and everyone's all "Oh, I am going on vacation to Portland" or "Today, the weather in Portland is..." without clarifying that they're talking about the also-ran city in Oregon and not the original American city in Maine.  It's bullshit and I hate it.

Dumbness of State Birds: Visualized

A reader named Hannah D. has come up with a cool way to visualize the dumbness of state birds as laid out in my State Birds: What They SHOULD Be post. Check out the map below, and see what your states' "dumb score" is. Thanks, Hannah!

State Birds: What They SHOULD Be

I drove over a bridge from Maryland into Virginia today and on the big "Welcome to Virginia" sign was an image of their state bird, the Northern Cardinal - with a yellow bill.  I should have scoffed - another Birds at Large on tap! - but it hardly registered.  Everyone knows that state birds are a big damn joke.  There are a million Cardinals, a scattering a Robins, and just a general lack of thought being put into the whole thing.

States should have to put more thought into their state bird than I put into picking my socks in the morning.  "Ugh, state bird?  I dunno, what're the guys next to us doing?  Cardinal?  OK, let's do that too.  Yeah put it on all the signs.  Nah no time to research the bill color let's just go."  It's the official state bird!  Well, since all these jackanape states are too busy passing laws requiring everyone to own guns or whatever to consider what their state bird should be, I guess I'll have to do it.

1. Alabama.  Official state bird: Yellowhammer.  

Right out of the gate with this thing.  Yellowhammer?  C'mon.  I Asked Jeeves and it told me that Yellowhammer is some backwoods name for a Yellow-shafted Flicker.  Sorry, but that's dumb.  If you want a woodpecker, go for something with a little more cache, something that's at least a full species.

What it should be: Red-cockaded Woodpecker

2. Alaska. Official state bird: Willow Ptarmigan

Willow Ptarmigans are the dumbest sounding birds on earth, sorry.  They sound like rejected Star Wars aliens, angrily standing outside the Mos Eisley cantina because their ID's were rejected.  Why go with these dopes, Alaska, when you're the best state to see the most awesome falcon on earth?

What it should be: Gyrfalcon

3. Arizona.  Official state bird: Cactus Wren

Cactus Wren is like the only boring bird in the entire state.  I can't believe it.

What it should be: Red-faced Warbler

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