Beyond the cardinal numbers: Have you heard about the state bird?

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mohawked diner appeared on Rocco’s last day.

“The vet was so gracious to come to our house to let us say goodbye to him at home,” said RunAbout Sports Roanoke co-owner Ally Bowersock. Rocco was a Brittany spaniel with a pinkish-beige nose and a snow-white chest. 

“The moment that Rocco’s spirit left earth, the cardinal was at our feeder,” said Bowersock.

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years ago, on February 26, 1926,¹ the Northern cardinal became the first bird to be designated the official bird of any state. At the time, the Northern cardinal’s scientific name was Richmondae cardinalis. Before that — from 1838 to 1918 — the scientific name had been Cardinalis virginianus. But the cardinal’s trailblazing designation as an official state bird didn’t happen in Richmond, Virginia. It happened in Frankfurt, Kentucky.

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college coaches contacted Charis Krouscas at midnight. It was September 1, 2025, the opening day of recruiting. And those college coaches from all over the country were texting and emailing the Blacksburg High School junior in hopes that she would choose to play for their lacrosse team. On March 3, Krouscas spoke to me on the phone from Liberty University where, in about four hours, she’d be running the 4 x 400 relay in the 4A Virginia High School State Championship. “What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say cardinal?” I asked. 

“Louisville,” she said…

as in the University of Louisville, as in the University of Louisville Cardinals: One of Virginia’s best lacrosse players will be a cardinal…

in another state.

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states — Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and West Virginia — had already chosen the Northern cardinal as their official state bird by January 25, 1950, when Virginia’s General Assembly passed House Resolution No. 9 elevating the mohawked songbird to official status alongside the American dogwood which had become Virginia’s first official state symbol — the official flower² — in 1918:

“Whereas, the Commonwealth of Virginia has not selected any official bird, which action has been taken by many other States, and

Whereas, the Cardinal by reason of its bright plumage and cheerful song is worthy of selection; and now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Delegates, the Senate concurring, that the Cardinal be and hereby is selected named and designated as the official bird of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

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million cardinals live in Virginia, making the Cardinalis cardinalis—as the bird has been scientifically known since 1983 — the most abundant bird in the state, according to the Virginia Bird Atlas. As if superlative abundance isn’t enough, the cardinal is top-notch in something else — a scientifically studied trait that attracts public affection and explains why the panda, not, let’s say, the endangered Virginia big-eared bat (the state’s official bat) is the flagship species featured on conservation logos. Cardinals — particularly the male cardinals — have what scientists call non-human charisma.  The males’ bright red feathers, black masks, spikey crests and clear, loud songs are easy to detect (“ecological charisma”) and beautiful (“aesthetic charisma”)

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months per year: Cardinals do not migrate. They do not molt. And they do not hold back from backyard feeders, especially if the feeders are stocked with Martin Hanbury’s Blacksburg Feed & Seed Co. special seed mix. When it comes to choosing a state bird, “The cardinal is a really great one because you can see it year round here. State symbols give us a pathway into a species, and the cardinal is a great beginning to learning the birds” said Julie Thomson, chief ranger of Visitor Experience at the New River Trail State Park in Wythe County. It was Friday, February 13, and Thomson would be leading a bird walk — my first ever — along the river.  She handed me a three-page eBirdfield checklist. We would be counting birds for the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), an annual, four-day “community science” project in which people around the globe count birds for at least 15 minutes and submit their counts online to Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology — the 300+ person lab that runs the free eBird app.

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Virginians — including Bowersock — use the eBird app. Bowersock and her two children participated in the GBBC and FeederWatch programs during the pandemic. That’s when they got into what Bowersock calls “a whole world of bird voyeurism.” These days “mornings are for sound identification, and evenings are when I check the video… Hey, hey, Kita! Hey…sorry, I’m walking my dogs, they must have seen a deer or something,” she said over the phone after a training session for the Arnold Pump & Run. For sound identification (often during dog walks), Bowersock uses the Merlin app—another free app run by Cornell and recommended by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources. For video, Bowersock has a birdfeeder with a built-in surveillance camera. “I’m checking all my mid-life crises—sourdough, pickle ball, birding. It’s such a cliché, but I embrace it fully.”

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species of birds are listed on the Virginia Society of Ornithology’s 2025-2026 official checklist.⁴ In Wythe County alone, there are 173 bird species. With so many species to choose from, Freya McGregor, a research associate in the Dayer Human Dimensions Lab of Virginia Tech’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, believes “there’s a lot of opportunity to choose birds that are different from other states. And there’s a lost opportunity to generate excitement about birds that are special in this specific place.” We spoke on the phone while she was in Seattle for a wildlife conference. Currently, only

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of the 50 states have their own bird. The Northern cardinal reigns as the most common, followed by the Western meadowlark (six states) and Northern mockingbird (five states). “There is an argument to be made for choosing a bird that is more accessible and more likely to be noticed,” McGregor said, “but I think every state should have its own bird.” Ornithologists at Cornell agree. Based on eBird data, they’ve proposed a new list of states birds, with no duplicates. For Virginia, they recommend the Acadian flycatcher. Ever seen one? 

Me neither.

And its scientific name — Empidonax virescens — is a lot harder to spell, pronounce and even remember than rockstar cool Cardinalis cardinalis.

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days after my first phone call to the Virginia General Assembly Information Desk, I dialed the number again. Again, Anne was the one who picked up the phone. “Anne? I’m just calling to thank you for the excellent advice to contact the Library of Virginia. If you hadn’t made that suggestion, I wouldn’t have found the original cardinal bill from 1950⁵ or learned about Mrs. Katherine B. Tippetts of Florida.” I told Anne — whose last name turns out to be Maxey and who is the receptionist at the General Assembly Information Desk for the 

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weeks per year that the Assembly is in session — about how state reference librarian Annie Hatton helped me sign up for a digital library card to access old issues of the Richmond Times-Dispatch online; about how Mrs. Katherine B. Tippetts was the Conservation Chairman of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) in the 1920s and started a vast, fervent campaign to persuade all 50 state legislatures to designate an official state bird; about how the GFWC librarian Joanna Church emailed me articles of Nature magazine from back in the 1920s and 1930s, including one in which Mrs. Katherine B. Tippetts erroneously wrote that the robin⁶ was Virginia’s state bird; about how the fluster of Richmond Times-Dispatch editorials⁷ arguing for and against the cardinal reminded of me of the black-capped chickadees (or Carolina chickadees?) and house sparrows (they’re invasive!) and Eastern bluebirds (yes, Henry David Thoreau, “The bluebird does carry the sky on his back”) and one blue jay plus a yellow-rumped warbler (a.k.a. “butterbutt”) darting to and from the feeder this morning. Maxey told me that when the Session would be over in another 

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weeks she “may start doing a little bit of birding.” Her favorite bird is one that comes to a small pond at her church where she meets her carpool for work. “It’s so many [birds] I love, but if I had to say one right now, I’d say the redwing blackbird. You’ll have to look it up,⁹ Abby.”

“Do you think the cardinal is the right bird?” I asked.

“I do, I really do. I think it’s so beautiful and we take it for granted. We are so blessed to be able to see them so often,” she answered. I told her about the Acadian flycatcher. “Now let me ask you something, Abby,” she said, “Was the turkey ever considered for the state bird?” 

No. But Benjamin Franklin once wrote a cheeky letter declaring that the nation’s bird should not be the “lazy” bald eagle, but a “Bird of Courage,” the turkey.⁸  And the lacrosse player with jersey

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thinks it should have been. Like McGregor, Krouscas thinks each state should have a different bird. “There shouldn’t be any cross-over. And then we can all unite under the bald eagle,” she said. 

“So, who gets the cardinal? Kentucky or Virginia?” I asked.

“Kentucky.”

“What about Virginia?”

“They can have the turkey.” 

Cards versus Hokies? 

Krouscas might have to be careful. 

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to -.6. That’s the “fight score” of wild turkeys versus the Northern cardinal. In Cornell’s aggression ranking of 136 species, the turkey came out on top as the #1 toughest bird.

180,000

Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) live in Virginia. 

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states have selected it as their official state bird. But official state birds can change. On February 11, nearly a century after Mrs. Katherine B. Tippetts got the Northern mockingbird designated as Florida’s state bird, Florida’s House of Representatives voted 112-1 to replace it. The bill, however, is currently stalled in the Senate. If it passes, Florida’s new official state bird will be the American flamingo.⁹

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degrees. “Come on up, come on up, come on up,” I willed the car thermometer to rise as I drove past frosty brownish fields, pink-streaked with sun. By the time the New River Trail GBBC bird walk began at 8:30, the air was up to 29 degrees. The rush of the water was stippled with bird calls, unidentifiable jibberish to me, but American robins and white-breasted nuthatches and Carolina wren to Thomson and another ranger named Brian Bockhahn who’s retiring from the North Carolina State Parks. “Everybody is always welcome to join, and when we’re out there, we want to make sure everybody gets to see everything, so we’re working together as a group. The leader is going to be out front helping other people get on the birds and keep track of the birds. It’s communication — so [you say] ‘the cardinal just flew over here, the duck landed over there…” Bockhahn explained. Thomson, after recommending that I borrow a pair of the park’s binoculars instead of using my grandfather’s leather-strapped, dusty-lensed 70-year-old pair, explained how to describe a bird’s position in a tree based on the face of a clock. 

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 o’clock, or maybe that’s, like, 8:45. Far tree, uh, don’t know what kind but it’s the one kinda by itself beyond that first row of trees and beyond the fence. There’s some kind of big — I mean, pretty big — bird. Black,” I trailed off. When I raised the binoculars¹⁰ to my eyes, all I saw was the black cross-hatch of my smushed eyelashes woven with black tree limbs and blue sky. Crruuck. Crruuck. WAIT, could that be a…

“Common raven,” Bockhahn said.

Sometimes the naked ear is better than the binoculared eye. 

Crruuck. There it was: Edgar Allan Poe’s midnight visitor. I suppose “Crrucked the Raven ‘Nevermore’” wouldn’t have exuded the ghastly gravitas of “Quoth.”

But what about the raven as the state bird? It’s up for grabs, and though Poe attended the University of Virginia for only one term 200 years ago, his presence at the University is easy to find and includes his preserved dorm room near the Lawn where my grandfather was once taken in the middle of the night to be initiated into The Raven Society.

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times per year, the Virginia Society of Ornithology (VSO) publishes a journal called The Raven. The only bird featured on the VSO logo is, in fact, a raven, of which about 28,000 live in Virginia. According to VSO board member Shirley Devan, the Society, which was founded in 1929, has about 900 members, a number that’s been steady for the last decade. Devan believes that the Northern cardinal is “very charismatic and attention-getting — easy to spot in your backyard or perched in a tree in the woods…[it’s] a great state bird.” Devan has been a birder since the 1990s. The black-and-white warbler was her spark. Bockhahn’s spark bird “that got me into birding nearly 30 years ago was the Northern flicker, an odd-looking woodpecker.”  Bowersock’s spark was Rocco’s Northern cardinal; Thomson’s, the Carolina wren — a bird whose call has been transcribed as teakettle, teakettle, teakettle (alternatively: cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger). But Thomson’s most formative bird memory is from her childhood in Michigan, where she and her grandfather built bluebird houses. Thomson gives backyard bird feeders a green light: “The one thing is to make sure that you’re not in an area where there are black bears. They’re attracted to birdseed. Going to your local bird feed store can help you learn what’s safe to put up at certain times of the year.”

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cardinals ate from my brand-new Squirrel Buster bird feeder, the first feeder I’d ever owned, the first day I put it up. From the thin, bare branches of a tree across the street, a male cardinal sang all morning without a snack. So, I followed the ranger’s advice and went to Blacksburg Feed & Seed Co., “the bird feed capital,” according to

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-year-old Martin Hanbury who started driving fertilizer trucks for “the old man” when he was 17 and became owner in 1984 and, during the “Beautiful!” three consecutive weeks of snow this winter sold 40 pallets of ice melt (“the good stuff”), plus all his shovels, propane and gas cans. The business has been in Hanbury’s family since 1947. Across old, wide-planked oak floors, Hanbury gave me a tour of giraffe-sized equipment — feed mixers, a molasses machine, a corn cracker, “the only one that still works.” I asked him about cardinals, and bears. “Are you a taxidermist or something?” he laughed. 

“No, just a writer. What seed is the absolute best for cardinals?”  

“Cardinals like the black oil sunflower, but all the seeds work. This one I mix myself is the primo mix. This is the filet.” He sold 

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20-pound bags of his mix last week (and one to me, plus a tray feeder, this week). I asked what makes his mix so special. “Well, there are two secret ingredients…and I’m not gonna…” Hanbury shook his head and chuckled, “Here let me show you something.” I followed him through the aisle of fishing equipment to the back of the store through a half-open door to a windowless and wood-paneled room. The wood paneling was barely visible beneath the deer and fish and antlers, at least one turkey, and a jackalope.¹¹ He showed me photos he’s taken of rattlesnakes just steps from his house, and a taxidermied rattler — “It’s so old most the stuff — fangs and rattles — have fallen off.” 

“Know what our official state snake is?” I asked. He raised his eyebrow and shifted his right ear toward me. I told him that, since 2016, it’s been the Eastern gartersnake. His eyebrows, for a split second, cinched downward toward his nose. He shrugged his shoulders, infinitesimally shook his head.

“Well, do you think the cardinal is the right choice to be the state bird?” 

 “Yes!” he quipped with a quick nod forward.

“How come?”

“Because it’s pretty.”

Mrs. Katherine B. Tippetts might’ve nodded her head, too. She, according to a GFWC news article published in February 1927, often repeated a particular quote written by William Henry Hudson, the Anglo-Venezuelan ornithologist and Hemingway-recommended author who wrote Green Mansions, a bird-filled, tropical romance featuring a child nature goddess who would eventually be played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1959 movie adaptation. Tippetts’ favored quote, however, didn’t come from the controversial, jungle-set novel. It came from Chapter 9 of Hudson’s minutely detailed, 1900-1902 nature journal, Hampshire Days: “The sense of the beautiful is God’s best gift to the human soul.” 

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seconds into the GBBC bird walk at New River State Park, a blip of red materialized on a slim branch

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feet above our heads. I blinked. 

The branch was empty, its black, breeze-quivered bareness framed by the gray rushing river. The superhero — red caped, black masked — was gone. No time for binoculars, a checklist, bird app or ranger. 

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seconds separated gold from silver at the state championship. Krouscas ran the third leg of the 4 x 400 relay for Blacksburg High School. When she took the baton, her team was in third. When she handed it off, “We were in first! Our last leg did a great job increasing the lead…I had a blast!” Less than 24 hours after Krouscas became a state champion in her first state meet, lacrosse season began. “Now that track is over, I’m full swing in lacrosse. I was glad to be back doing my favorite thing,” she texted me after her first practice. The spark that ignited Krouscas’ passion for lacrosse was an older cousin, an older cousin who now plays lacrosse at Cornell, whose athletic teams are known as the “The Big Red” despite being located in a state — New York — whose official bird is almost entirely blue.

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bluebirds live in Australia. That’s where McGregor grew up. Northern cardinals weren’t in her Australian field guide either. Plus, Christmas in Australia is in the summer, “so the vast majority of mass-produced [holiday] imagery wasn’t relevant,” she said. “Most of our birds in Australia are multiple colors so when you see a Christmas card or wrapping paper with an entirely blue bird except for a rusty belly next to an entirely red bird, you’re like, I don’t think so, this is so fake. It just didn’t seem legit.” McGregor saw a real male cardinal for the first time when she moved to Texas in her 20s. “I remember being like, hey, huh, no way, that’s that bird…one of those birds on cheesy North American Christmas cards…no way.”

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mourning dove shared the screened enclosure with the female cardinal at the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center in Roanoke. The door creaked as I followed the center’s founder, Sabrina Garvin, inside. A donated Christmas tree, bare of ornaments, leaned against the wall in the corner. Various branches and foliage arched over our heads. Pale swaths of late afternoon sun streamed through the roof. The ghostly murmurs of French horn that I, a non-birder who — blame it on Jurassic Park raptors, a parakeet named Sprite who once bit me, or Edgar Allan Poe — sweats in the presence of any bird other than a baby penguin, had always thought were the hoots of an owl came from the dove. 

From the cardinal came the fan-snap flap of wings, and an epiphany: 

Female cardinals are not the color I thought they were. 

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times a day for two weeks 1,292 participants in a study at King’s College London received a ping from an app to rate how they were feeling and whether or not they could see or hear any birds at that moment. What researchers learned from the

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responses is that noticing birdlife for even a brief moment is linked to lower psychological stress and fewer depression symptoms: The birds in our states affect¹² the states of our minds.

 One way birding may boost mental health is by catalyzing awe. “Birding,” said Bowersock, “is a way of incorporating awe into everyday life.”  

Awe, as defined in a seminal 2003 scientific paper, has two dimensions: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation. You encounter something that feels larger (“vaster”) than your typical experience and that new, larger frame of reference requires you to adapt (to “accommodate”) your understanding of the world. You have an epiphany.

Bowersock said, “It’s almost like an element of surprise. You could be getting your oil changed and be like, oh, what is this chickadee doing here?”

Oh, entirely red birds are not confined to the plastic flakes of snow globes.

Oh, some woodpeckers called yellow-bellied sapsuckers peck neat, horizontal rows of holes (“sap wells”) on tree trunks.

Oh, female cardinals are not red. 

And the dull, demure, entirely forgettable brown I thought they were…not so much.

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years of scientific research into awe has produced consistent, mounting evidence that awe can change the brain. Those shifts in neurophysiology correspond to a heightened sense of meaning. For example, a set of six studies published in 2021 indicates that experiencing a moment of awe puts “daily stressors into perspective,” thereby increasing well-being and life satisfaction. The six studies didn’t examine bird-induced awe, but McGregor has witnessed birding’s calming effects on her husband. He has flashbacks from his time as a combat medic on front lines in Iraq, Afghanistan and Honduras. “It’s fascinating watching the stress roll off his body when he’s outdoors just birding, not doing anything else,” McGregor said.

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cardinals were treated at the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center in 2025. The female cardinal living with the dove is the first one so far in 2026. She’d been brought to the center on January 9 with no tail feathers after hitting a window and, possibly, being caught by a dog.

Garvin started the center over a cup of coffee about 25 years ago when her husband declared that she needed a hobby. Today, Garvin is cradling a gray fluffball named Baldwin. She hands the miniature squirrel a shelled pistachio. His paws are smaller than the nut, his claws tiny as dandelion fuzz. Garvin tells me that the cardinal will be released when her tail feathers grow another 

½

inch. “Cardinals are easier to grow tail feathers than other birds; some others are nightmares,” she said.

Despite their propensity for growing tail feathers, “Cardinals are probably our most dreaded species,” said Garvin, “because when you pick them up to get their weight, they’ll bite you.” They bite down so hard that you have to get a pair of hinged, surgical instruments called hemostats to pry the beak apart. “Between those and the grossbeak hawk,” Garvin pushed her glasses up higher on her nose, “I’d rather be bitten by the hawk. That cardinal beak clamps. It clamps, and you can’t pull it apart — it’s perfect.”

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ounces of frozen yogurt later, 5.5-year-old Colin Hilton flung a penny¹³ into the fountain at the University Mall in Blacksburg. He pulled up the hem of his purple sweatshirt to reveal a Megalodon T-shirt. The megalodon,¹⁴ an extinct shark as long as a bowling lane, holds the all-time record for strongest bite in the animal kingdom: 

40,000 

pounds of force in a single bite, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. To Colin, the importance of the megalodon is that it’s the name of a shark-faced monster truck he got to see at last year’s Monster Jam. To the people of Maryland, the importance of the megalodon is that it could join the Baltimore oriole as an official state emblem. The megalodon will be the first official state shark designated in the country, if House Bill 97 becomes law.

Embodying the gummy bears that he’d used two spoons to excavate from his strawberry-orange yogurt swirl, Colin bounced for a photo beneath The Bird That Lived In Snow. The mixed-media piece was part of a school art exhibition at the mall. I walked by it a few days before, on my way into the Weight Club for yet another treadmill session after three consecutive weeks of snow-and-ice covered sidewalks. I backtracked. I stepped closer. I had to find the artist, the person whose work sparked me to begin this state symbol project with the symbol that I initially said I wouldn’t¹⁵ — with the cardinal.

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miles and 1 hour, 36 minutes later, we’d counted 23 species of birds and 122 individual birds for our GBBC ebird checklist. The bird walk wouldn’t count as cardio. But I did feel a whiff of a burn in my shoulders and biceps from holding the binoculars up to my face. Our most common bird was the Canada¹⁶ goose, at 33 individuals, mostly floating sedately in the river; followed by the American robin at 30, mostly hopping spastically on the ground like sixth graders at a middle school dance. Proving that my fear of failing to find the most abundant bird in the state was ridiculous neuroticism, we counted 3 cardinals — 2 males, 1 female. Cheer-cheer-cheer. Unlike females of most other songbird species, female cardinals sing. One cardinal singing alone sounds like a very talented car alarm. Add in a purple finch, Eastern towhee, white-throated sparrow and tufted titmouse (according to Merlin) and you’re right in the middle of a Star Wars sky battle.

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of the birders¹⁷ in a study conducted by Virginia Tech researchers “identified as having a disability that led to access challenges that impacted their birding.” McGregor, who is an occupational therapist with a clinical background in blindness and low vision services, has a knee condition called chondromalacia. She’s birded from benches, in cars, and on boats. “Birding is inherently modifiable. You do it in a way that works for you,” she said. Her forthcoming book, A Field Guide to Accessible Birding in the United States, is the first bird travel guide written by a disabled birder for disabled birders. McGregor takes a strength-based approach to disabled birding. “Instead of trying to remediate someone’s deficits, what if we figured out what someone’s strengths were and leaned into those,” she said. She described examples of a person in a wheelchair being lower to the ground and, therefore, noticing more birds down in the bushes; or birders with hearing loss picking up visual details like nests that hearing birders might miss; or neurodivergent birders leveraging their sound sensitivity to identify birds by sound. Indeed, as demonstrated in a study of 31 birders with sight impairments, “sonic charisma” is powerful.

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Latin roots are important to the origin of the word cardinal: (1) cardinalis meaning “principal, chief, essential,” and (2) cardo meaning “pertaining to a hinge…that on which something turns or depends; pole of the sky.” Both Latin roots apply to the Catholic leaders called cardinals; their red robes and pointed hats may have inspired the name of the cardinal bird. In addition, “hinge” relates to myths about the cardinal bird as a connection to heaven. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, “It is common folklore that a visit from a cardinal represents a sign from a loved one who has passed.” And the Natural History Society of Maryland cites the saying, “Cardinals appear when angels are near.” Bowersock talked about “the lore of cardinals being spirits of people you love who have passed on. The cardinal is kind of a signal that I’m in another place, and I’m okay.” 

Bowersock recognized something special in the cardinal who showed up the day Rocco died. It was a one-of-a-kindness that cannot be counted. This ineffable yet identifiable uniqueness is called haeccity. Haeccity, according to Oxford University scholar Jamie Lorimer, is a dimension of non-human charisma that’s experienced as  “a moment of awe-full or enchanting proximity to another animal.” Intentionally devoting attention to this one small feathered blip in the universe wakes you up to the unbounded, vast essence in a single individual — a cardinal, a Brittany spaniel, a business owner:

The body you can count has vitality beyond measure,
worth beyond a checklist,
full membership in the shared phenomenon of being distinctly alive. 

Poet Mary Oliver, in her poem¹⁸ “Wild Geese,” puts it this way:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place in the family of things. 

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day, 1 visit, and Krouscas knew. “The family dynamic,” she said, “at Louisville is huge. It was the sense of community in the locker room and around campus. No one steps on the cardinal head —” 

I interrupted, “An imprint or decal on the sidewalk?” 

“Yes, you never step on it. The cardinal represents so much. It’s the family.”

It’s also one of her mother’s favorite Christmas ornaments.

“3,”

said Colin when I asked if he had seen any cardinals that day. Colin, with the help of his mother, dumped the sand from his red boots. Red is Colin’s favorite color, the sandbox his favorite part of the school day. And his favorite monster truck is El Toro Loco. 

“When did you make The Bird That Lived In Snow,?” I asked between bouts of owl impressions he’d learned from the sounds on his father’s Merlin app. 

“In art class,” he answered, “back in the day.” I demonstrated how Chessie, the great horned owl at the wildlife center, widens and crosses her enormous, perfectly circular eyes when she hoots.

“Why did you make a cardinal?”

“Because the teacher said so,” Colin said, eyes locked on the index finger he drew to the tip of his nose. Crossing your eyes requires practice.

“Would you rather be a cardinal for a day or drive El Toro Loco?”

“El Toro.”

 We hooted again, fist-bumped goodbye, and walked out of the mall, into the sleet.

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years ago, Alice Bradshaw was born in Lexington. That’s Lexington, Virginia, not Lexington, Kentucky. She went to Longwood College and UVA, became a nurse with a special touch for preemies; then a wife, member of various dancing, book, and garden clubs, mother of three daughters, and grandmother of eight grandchildren. We call her Ali. Ali fell back in January. She hasn’t regained her ability to walk and was moved to the Roman Eagle, a skilled nursing facility in Danville. She says that she’ll make my father dinner from the peas and corn that are in her closet. She thinks the closet is a refrigerator. She asks the nurses why no one is taking her to the hospital; she says she can hear the babies crying in the nursery and needs to go to work. 

I lean over the rail of her hospital bed and look into her light blue eyes.

“WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BIRD, ALI?”

She maintains eye contact: “The cardinal.”

Cardinalis cardinalis: a hinge to the essential.

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weeks after she was admitted, the cardinal was released from the screened pen back into the wild.  Will she ever come to my feeder? I’m not counting on it. But if she drops by, perhaps I’ll recognize her:

feathers gold-streaked, like dried grass in a frosted field, that, in this slant of light, glows pink.

Upcoming birding opportunities

Free guided bird walks at New River State Park:

Friday, March 20: Ivanhoe Birding Trail
Friday, April 17: Foster Falls (Earth Day)
Friday, May 15: Ivanhoe Birding Trail

Virginia Society of Ornithology New River Valley Field Trip: May 1-3

Lion’s Tail Accessible Trail (.5 mile trail designed for the visually impaired): opens the first Friday in April

Notes

1. Literally 100 years ago: Today, the day I’m writing the first draft of this article, is February 26, 2026.
2. The dogwood started double-symbol-duty when it was voted the state’s official tree in 1956. It’s the only entity with two official designations. 
3. Between March 3 and March 5, the number of Virginians on eBird grew from 54,455 to 54,472.
4. Not to be confused with the eBird checklist or the American Bird Association checklist or the Avibase checklists of the world or, well, the checklist of checklists goes on and on. 
5. Virginia’s online archive of bills—the Legislative Information System (LIS)—goes back to only 1994.
6. Although Virginia didn’t have an official bird in the 1920s, in 1912 Virginia did pass a law protecting the robin, according to Virginia: State Name, Flag, Seal, Song, Bird, Flower by George Earle Shankle: “Shooting at, killing or capturing robins at any time, or to take or destroy their nests and eggs” was considered a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of “not less than five nor more than fifty dollars.” Plus, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, eventually signed by the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan and Russia, made it “unlawful without a waiver to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, or sell” nearly 1,100 species of birds, including the Northern cardinal (even though it does not migrate). The act put a stop to the turn-of-the-century trend of capturing, caging and selling cardinals as pets—a trend that (temporarily) squashed the cardinal population.
7. So much aplomb about #plummage. #betterthanTwitter. First, from Birdie May Baugh on February 3, 1950: “…Last year I saw a sheet from a New York paper….Virginia’s was listed as the robin…I am glad the New York paper was mistaken, although I love Rube Robin…He deserts us for a while in Winter and does not return until February. Our State bird should cheer us when Mother Nature is clothed in her most depressing garment…” Second, from Mrs. James H. Adams, President of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, on January 22, 1950: “For many years now we have been embarrassed when forced to admit that Virginia does not have a State bird….the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs made a request of our 8,000 members asking that they consider the choice of a bird for Virginia…the cardinal has been unanimously selected…The cardinal does not desert us in Winter, as does the robin…No consideration of any other State’s bird was made in our choice. The fact that our neighbor’s was the same as ours only verifies the popularity of the cardinal.” Third, also on January 22, from Mrs. James H. Donohue, President of the Richmond Council of Garden Clubs responding to an editorial opposing the cardinal: “Perhaps it would assist the mental confusion of the writer to admit to him that ‘red’ induces the most inconsistent psychological reactions of any other color. It symbolizes danger, courage, shame, dignity, passion, sex and many other emotions and is the favorite color of women. The red tints of sunrise and sunset can hardly be considered as less beautiful than we view them because of Communists being classed as ‘Reds’…”
8. There’s a myth, particularly regaled around Thanksgiving, that Benjamin Franklin was peeved that the bald eagle — not the turkey — was designated as the nation’s official bird. If you read the entire letter from which that myth emerged, you’ll see that Franklin was probably entertained, not irate, by the debate over official winged fauna. In a twinkly-eyed letter to his daughter, Franklin wrote, “[the] Bald Eagle…is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly…[he] is too lazy to fish for himself…[the turkey] is a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America…He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage.”
9. The American Flamingo is the largest bird in the largest book in the Newman Library Special Collections at Virginia Tech. I made an appointment in the Special Collections room to see Virginia’s Birdlife: An Annotated Checklist, a book recommended on the Virginia Society of Ornithology website. It’s a thin, black-and-white, paperback with bird counts in various regions. I can’t say I recommend the book. As I left, I glanced back into the room. A bird — an egret of some kind? — caught my eye. It was standing in the white splayed pages of what turned out to be one of the 60-pound volumes of Birds of America by John James Audubon. The set of books is so big — it’s called a “double elephant folio” — that it came with its own piece of furniture — a hefty display from which it takes two people to lift the volumes. Fortunately, the special collection’s assistant director Kira Dietz was available to help me find, lift, and carefully turn the pages of the tome with the Northern Cardinal. Plate 395 had a red male and goldish-brown female — both life-sized, as are all the birds in the book. When Anne Maxey recommended that I look up her favorite bird, the redwing blackbird, I almost made another appointment in the Special Collections room. I decided against it for two reasons: First, learning about Audubon’s cruelty to animals — humans and non-humans — made the book even heavier, too heavy, at least for the time being. Second, you can see the illustrations online, including the cardinal, no appointment necessary.
10. The last time I seriously used binoculars was circa 2000 at Wrigley Field. I was looking for a cotton candy vendor. Two weeks after the bird walk, I stepped out onto the deck as 1-2-3 enormous black silhouettes landed high in a distant tree. I bolted inside. Flung open the front closet door. From the back of the top shelf, grabbed a leather satchel. Fumbled it open as I dashed back through the foyer and living room out the door to the deck. 1-2-3…4-5…6. Blackish-brown long feathers. Pale beaks. Red heads — bare red heads: Turkey Vultures. Crystal clear through my grandfather’s binoculars.
11. from Montana. No official state status. The kind of Frankensteinian charisma that elicits a special variety of awe that re-arranged my brain in, maybe, not a good way. I had another awful experience a few nights later. Between Hanbury’s rattlers and the snake in Green Mansions, it’s not surprising that I dreamed a snake bit my right hand. A snake hadn’t gotten me, but a tick had — a deer tick, according to the tick identification card Thomson had given me. 
12. “Affect” is poetic license. This study used an observational, not experimental, research design. Therefore, the results demonstrate correlation, not causation. It’s not scientifically accurate to write that seeing a bird causes stress reductions.
13. and wished for a $1,500 transformer. My apologies to his mother.
14. According to the Calvert Marine Museum, which is itself an official state emblem of Maryland, the megalodon bred in the Chesapeake Bay. Fossilized megalodon teeth have been found in at least seven Maryland counties. 
15. How uninspired, blasé, and practically mercantile to start this series with the symbol that’s not only the name of the media service for which I’m writing but also the symbol that’s in our faces every day on license plates and garden flags, door mats and stationery.
16. Yes, it’s Canada goose, not Canadian goose.
17. “I propose that we redefine birding to be: the act of enjoying wild birds,” McGregor wrote in an article for Audubon Magazine. In our conversation, she said, “There are two reasons why we should use birding instead of bird-watching across the board.” First, it takes away the elitism associated with competitive birding that arose in the 1970s. Second, “is that watching implies your eyeballs and illegitimizes how plenty of blind birders — and even most sighted birders — bird by ear.”
18. Two other birding poems: “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens and #314 by Emily Dickinson: “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers – that perches in the soul.”