Miami is asking Tallahassee to give Florida a pinker state bird.
City Commissioners voted last month to urge the Legislature to replace the relatively ordinary mockingbird with the American flamingo, reviving a proposal passed overwhelmingly in the House this year before dying in the Senate.
Commissioner Ralph Rosado sponsored the resolution calling for the change. It passed unanimously. WLRN first reported on the vote.
The vote came almost exactly three months after Miami-Dade Commissioners approved related legislation to designate the flamingo as the county’s official bird, citing the species’ ties to Florida wildlife and tourism, among other things.
Florida lawmakers came close to doing the same statewide during the 2026 Session.
In February, the House approved a bill (HB 11) by Republican Reps. Chip LaMarca of Lighthouse Point and Jim Mooney of Islamorada.
Pensacola Republican Rep. Alex Andrade, who has called for the pelican to be designated the state’s Northwest fishing bird, cast the only opposing vote.
HB 11 would have named the flamingo as Florida’s state bird and the Florida scrub-jay its state songbird. Supporters contended that the flamingo is far more recognizable as a Florida fowl than the mockingbird, which is the state bird of four other states, and that the scrub-jay is appropriate because it’s the only bird species found exclusively in Florida.
But the bill died after reaching the Senate, where its identical upper-chamber companion (SB 150) by Doral Republican Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez languished unheard after clearing the first of three committees to which it was referred.
The result preserved a designation the mockingbird has held since 1927.
Similar bills LaMarca, Mooney and Miami Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia carried in 2025 met the same fate. Mooney told Florida Politics then that his proposal connected the flamingo’s continued presence to Everglades restoration while highlighting the scrub-jay’s shrinking habitat.
“The flamingos are staying around because the environmental work in the Everglades has finally started to turn a corner and allow fresh water to flow south into the Florida Bay. The scrub-jay, it’s under assault from development,” he said at the time.
“But it’s bigger than just the birds. It’s about continuing to preserve our green space and wetlands, which are massive ecosystems.”
Miami’s resolution describes flocks of flamingos inhabiting the Keys and Florida Bay in the 1800s before hunting eliminated them from the state. Captive breeding and migration subsequently restored their presence.
Efforts to replace the mockingbird with the scrub-jay date back decades. Students pushed for the change in the 1990s, drawing opposition from influential then-National Rifle Association lobbyist Marion Hammer. At a 1999 House committee hearing, Hammer said that the scrub-jay’s habit of begging for food was “lazy” and showed “a welfare mentality.”
In a 2023 Tallahassee Democrat op-ed, she called scrub-jays “evil little birds that steal other birds’ eggs and kill the babies of other birds.”