Unsurprisingly, not all bird species are equally popular in the United States. One way to measure this is by looking at how often they have been chosen as official state birds.

The undisputed champion is the Northern Cardinal, selected by seven states. It is followed by the Western Meadowlark (six states) and the Northern Mockingbird (five states). After that, the field gets much more fragmented, with familiar species such as bluebirds, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Brown Thrasher, Black-capped Chickadee, and Common Loon appearing in multiple states.

The pattern is fairly clear: Americans tend to prefer familiar neighbors over obscure specialists. A bird does not need to be rare or restricted to the state to become a symbol of it. It helps much more if people see it in their backyard. The populists are winning.

This also explains why some birds have struggled to gain political fame. The California Gull, for example, is the official bird of only one state — and despite its name, that state is not California but Utah.

Even an ambitious campaign by MAAGA (Make American Gulls Great Again) has so far failed to convince other states that gulls deserve more recognition.