What is the Texas state bird?

How did the mockingbird become the Texas state bird?

The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs asked for it, according to the Handbook of Texas, and in 1927 the 40th Legislature adopted Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 8 naming the mockingbird, as the Texas State Library and Archives Commission records. Texas Highways, the state's travel magazine, says Gov. Dan Moody signed it.

A concurrent resolution isn't a statute, and a 1997 House bill analysis said so plainly: “Technically the 1927 adoption of the state bird is not a law.” In 2001 the Legislature added the state bird to the Texas Government Code, where Section 3101.007 names the mockingbird in a single sentence.

Why did Texas choose the mockingbird?

The resolution praised a bird that is everywhere and stands its ground. As Texas Highways quotes it, the mockingbird is found “in winter and in summer, in the city and the country,” and is “a fighter for protection of his home, falling, if need be, in its defense.” Its last words are “like any true Texan.”

Audubon painted that fight long before 1927. Plate 21 of The Birds of America, “The Mocking Bird,” shows mockingbirds defending their nest from a rattlesnake; a review printed in his Ornithological Biography (vol. 1, 1831) lists it as “Mocking Birds defending their nest from a Rattlesnake.” See plate 21 free at Audubon.org, or read its story on our Northern Mockingbird painting page.

Where can you see a mockingbird in Texas?

Almost anywhere, in any month. Texas Parks and Wildlife says mockingbirds live year-round across Texas, in just about every habitat type in the state.

They are most vocal from February to July and again from late August through October, and in the southern parts of the state they sing all year (TPWD). A mockingbird singing at night is a male without a mate: TPWD says only unmated males sing then.

Most of what you hear is its own song. A mockingbird can copy about 50 other birds, and sounds like rusty hinges and barking dogs, yet only about 10 percent of its singing is mimicry.

Two Texas mockingbird stories

The oldest one on record was a Texan. The oldest wild Northern Mockingbird in the federal banding records was banded in Texas on May 1, 1986, and found dead in Texas on April 22, 2000, at least 14 years and 10 months old (USGS Bird Banding Laboratory). That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan.

Cage birds that wouldn't sing. Until the early twentieth century, the Handbook of Texas says, the mockingbird was a popular caged bird. The book our painting comes from, Keulemans's Onze Vogels in Huis en Tuin (1873), complains that mockingbirds shipped from America rarely sang in a cage: of thirty bought by a London dealer, “only one of them sang” (our translation). It adds that buyers paid a hundred dollars or more for a single bird (the book on the Internet Archive).

Which other states have the mockingbird as their state bird?

Four: Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee, five mockingbird states in all. Florida nearly left the group: in 2026, bills to make the American flamingo its state bird passed the Florida House but died in the Senate on March 13, 2026 (Florida Senate).

Tennessee's choice was close. In its 1933 statewide vote the mockingbird won 15,553 votes to the robin's 15,073, with the cardinal third (The Migrant, March 1933). Seven other states did pick the cardinal: why so many chose it.

Texas birders once chose a bird of their own. In 1956 the Texas Ornithological Society made the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher its official bird, Texas Highways says. That is a club's emblem, not a state symbol; the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher is Oklahoma's state bird.

Questions about the Texas state bird