What is the District of Columbia state bird?

Why does the District of Columbia have an official bird?

Because it adopted one, even though it isn't a state. The Office of the Secretary of the District of Columbia says the Wood Thrush “became the District of Columbia official Bird” after it was “Approved on January 31, 1967.”

The page doesn't say who approved it, and the date comes six years before the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of December 24, 1973 (D.C. Code § 1-201.01).

The bird is also missing from the District's code. Title 1, chapter 1, has sections for an official dinosaur, rock, fish, amphipod, amphibian, music, mammal and fruit, but none for a bird (D.C. Code, Title 1, chapter 1).

Some lists online date the Wood Thrush to 1938. The only 1938 on the District's own symbols page is the flag's: “Approved October 25, 1938.”

Was the wood thrush Audubon's favorite bird?

He said so. His account of the Wood Thrush, in the first volume of his Ornithological Biography (1831), opens by naming it his greatest favorite among the birds of the woods (Audubon's text, vol. 1).

He tells why. After stormy nights camped alone in the forest, soaked, cold and far from his family, he heard the bird at first light, “the delightful music of this harbinger of day,” and felt that no one should ever despair.

Its song, he wrote, “although composed of but few notes, is so powerful, distinct, clear, and mellow” that no one could hear it unmoved. He painted it himself, too: the Wood Thrush is plate 73 of The Birds of America.

Who painted the wood thrush on this page?

Louis Agassiz Fuertes. He painted it for the Seventh Report of the Forest, Fish and Game Commission of the State of New York, the report for 1901, printed in 1902, and signed the plate in its lower corner.

The full plate shows two birds, and its legend names them: “Upper figure, Wood Thrush” and “Lower figure, Hermit Thrush.” The lower bird, cropped from this page, is the state bird of Vermont (the full plate).

Where can you see a Wood Thrush in the District of Columbia?

To find one inside the city, go to Rock Creek. The DC Bird Alliance names its songbird project after the creek, and the project focuses on the Piney Branch section of Rock Creek National Park. Go early, when the singing is at its best.

Your ears will find it first. The Office of the Secretary describes a forest bird of the eastern United States that is “more often heard than seen.”

It doesn't need wilderness. The National Audubon Society's guide says it “sometimes nests in suburbs and city parks,” and that in eastern woodlands “its flutelike songs add music to summer mornings.”

It is a long-distance traveler: the guide says wood thrushes migrate mostly at night, many of them across the Gulf of Mexico, and that their numbers “have declined seriously in recent decades.”

The oldest Wood Thrush in the federal banding records was a male banded in Connecticut on June 13, 2002, already at least in his third year (age codes), and caught and released there on August 4, 2010: at least 10 years and 2 months old (USGS Bird Banding Laboratory; see the oldest wild birds).

Does any other state have the wood thrush?

No. No state has chosen the Wood Thrush, so among the 50 states and DC it is the District's alone. Its neighbors chose Maryland the Baltimore Oriole and Virginia the Northern Cardinal.

Questions about the District of Columbia state bird