What is the Alabama state bird?

Why is Alabama called the Yellowhammer State?

Because of a shout in a Kentucky town, as the Alabama Department of Archives and History tells it. Alabama “has been known as the ‘Yellowhammer State’ since the Civil War,” the archives' state bird page says (Alabama Department of Archives and History).

In the archives' account, a company of young cavalrymen from Huntsville arrived at Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in new uniforms trimmed with “bits of brilliant yellow cloth” on the sleeves, collars and coattails. As they rode past Company A, Will Arnett called out, “Yellowhammer, Yellowhammer, flicker, flicker!” The men laughed, and the name spread to all the Alabama troops.

It stayed with them after the war: veterans, the archives say, “wore a yellowhammer feather in their caps or lapels during reunions.” The state's Outdoor Alabama site tells the same story of the “yellowhammer company” in brief.

The company itself was real. John Allan Wyeth's Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1899) lists “Company F, Captain Kelley, from Huntsville, Alabama, about 90” men in Forrest's battalion in October 1861, which was then posted to Hopkinsville (Wyeth). But Wyeth says nothing of yellow trim or a nickname, and we found no wartime record of the shout: it is Alabama's tradition, as its archives keep it.

How did the yellowhammer become the Alabama state bird?

Through one lawmaker's pair of bills. Representative Thomas E. Martin of Montgomery introduced House Bill 718, “To designate the bird commonly called the Yellowhammer as the State Bird.” It became Act No. 542, approved on September 6, 1927, when Bibb Graves was governor (General Laws of Alabama, 1927).

The same day, Martin's House Bill 717 became Act No. 541, which made the goldenrod Alabama's state flower. Only the bird lasted: in 1959 the Legislature replaced the goldenrod with the camellia, and the yellowhammer stayed (Code of Alabama).

The act gave no reason for its choice. It spelled the name as one word, “Yellowhammer”; the Code of Alabama, at § 1-2-7, now hyphenates it: “The bird commonly called the yellow-hammer is hereby designated the state bird.”

Alabama has since added a turkey and a cookie. The wild turkey has been the state game bird since 1980, and in 2023 “The Yellowhammer Cookie,” from Montgomery, became the official state cookie.

Is the yellowhammer a woodpecker?

Yes. The yellowhammer is the Northern Flicker, and of the 50 state birds in our table, it is the only woodpecker. The archives' page gives its “Correct common name” from the American Ornithologists' Union: Northern Flicker.

It took naturalists a while to place it. In 1758 Linnaeus named it Cuculus auratus, filing the flicker among the cuckoos, from Mark Catesby's “Golden-winged Wood-pecker” of South Carolina (AOU Check-list, 1983).

In Europe, the name means another bird altogether: a Yellowhammer there is an Old World bunting, Emberiza citrinella (AviList).

Where can you see a yellowhammer in Alabama?

Often on the ground, and often on a lawn. Flickers are “fairly common to uncommon in all seasons and regions” of Alabama, says Outdoor Alabama, the state conservation department's site, in open woodlands and groves with dead trees and in “towns and parks.” The archives add that they are found “all the months of the year” and are “commonly observed feeding on lawns.”

They are looking for ants. “Flickers spend a majority of their feeding time on the ground probing for ants,” Outdoor Alabama says, and the archives go further: “Flickers are reported to eat more ants than any other American bird.” They nest from March into July.

The oldest Northern Flicker in the federal banding records was a male banded in Florida on March 31, 1965, and found dead in Florida in August 1973, at least 9 years and 2 months old (USGS Bird Banding Laboratory; more on our page of the oldest wild birds).

What did Audubon write about the yellowhammer?

That it ended up in the market. “Some are now and then exposed in the markets of New York and Philadelphia,” he wrote in his Ornithological Biography (vol. 1, 1831), though he found the meat “very disagreeable” (Audubon's text).

He enjoyed its escapes. When a hawk chases one into a hole, he wrote, “it is pleasing to see the disappointment of the Hawk.”

The painting on this page is his plate 37. The names people gave the flicker in his day, and more of his stories about it, are on our Northern Flicker painting page.

Does any other state have the yellowhammer?

No. Alabama is the only state with the Northern Flicker as its state bird. Its neighbors went for songbirds: Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida the mockingbird, and Georgia the Brown Thrasher.

Questions about the Alabama state bird