Miami Urges Tallahassee to Make the Flamingo Florida's State Bird, Reviving a Fight the Senate Let Die

The city of Miami wants Florida to trade in its state bird. The Miami City Commission voted unanimously last month to urge the Florida Legislature to replace the northern mockingbird, the state's official bird since 1927, with the American flamingo, reviving a proposal that sailed through the Florida House this year before dying in the Senate.

The resolution, sponsored by Commissioner Ralph Rosado, passed at the commission's Oct. 22 meeting, according to WLRN, which first reported the vote. It asks state leaders to bring the bill back in the next legislative session because the "American flamingo is closely associated with Florida's natural environment, cultural identity, tourism, and public imagery," in the resolution's words.

What Miami asked for

The resolution is symbolic: a city cannot change a state designation. But it adds a second major South Florida government to the flamingo's cause. Almost exactly three months earlier, on July 21, the Miami-Dade County Commission approved legislation naming the American flamingo the official county bird, citing the species' ties to Florida wildlife and tourism.

Florida Politics reported that Miami's resolution recounts how flocks of flamingos lived in the Florida Keys and Florida Bay in the 1800s before hunting wiped them out of the state, and how captive breeding and migration later restored their presence.

The vote came during a busy meeting in which commissioners also advanced tougher animal cruelty penalties and created a fund for private donations to city projects, WLRN reported.

How close the state came in 2026

The Legislature nearly made the change this year. HB 11, filed by Republican Reps. Jim Mooney of Islamorada and Chip LaMarca of Lighthouse Point, would have designated the American flamingo as the official state bird and the Florida scrub-jay as the official state songbird. It cleared two House panels and passed the full House 112-1 on Feb. 11, 2026. Pensacola Republican Rep. Alex Andrade, who has pushed for the pelican to be named the state's Northwest fishing bird, cast the lone no vote.

The Senate never took it up. HB 11 died in the Senate Rules Committee when the session ended March 13. Its identical Senate companion, SB 150 by Doral Republican Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, cleared the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee 6-0 on Nov. 4, 2025, but then sat without a hearing and died in the Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Environment, and General Government, the second of its three committee stops.

The 2026 bills were not the first attempt. Similar bills carried in 2025 by LaMarca, Mooney and Miami Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia met the same fate. Mooney told Florida Politics at the time that the proposal tied the flamingo's comeback to Everglades restoration.

"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," Mooney said then.

The case for the flamingo, and for the scrub-jay

Supporters argue the flamingo is far more recognizable as a Florida bird than the mockingbird. The pink wader appears in the opening scenes of "Miami Vice" and on the Florida Lottery logo, WSVN noted when Miami-Dade adopted it. The mockingbird, by contrast, is also the state bird of Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, according to a Florida Senate staff analysis.

The Legislature picked the mockingbird in 1927 through Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 3, praising a bird whose "melody of its music has delighted the heart of residents and visitors to Florida," according to the Senate analysis.

The scrub-jay half of the proposal has its own logic. The Florida scrub-jay is the only bird species found exclusively in Florida, and it is listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. Its main threats are habitat loss and fragmentation from development and agriculture, along with fire suppression in the sandy scrub where it lives, the Senate analysis said.

Ron Magill, the longtime conservationist and former Zoo Miami spokesperson who has campaigned for the change, told Miami-Dade commissioners in July that the flamingo "represents how nature can come back, can reclaim itself, when given the opportunity," NBC 6 reported.

A bird that came back

The Senate analysis describes the American flamingo as a wading bird that stands about five feet tall and filters crustaceans, mollusks and other small invertebrates from the water. It was a historical resident of Florida until overhunting around the turn of the 20th century drove it from the state. By 1925, captive breeding in South Florida had reintroduced the bird, and some flamingos appear to have migrated to Florida on their own throughout the 1900s. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission considers the species native.

The flamingo's profile rose sharply after Hurricane Idalia in August 2023. Audubon Florida said the storm likely caught birds from Cuba and the Yucatan and blew them across Florida, with sightings from St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge south to Collier County and in several other states. An Audubon-organized survey in February 2024 counted 101 wild American flamingos across Florida, according to WGCU.

That 2024 count found the birds clustered in a few places.

"I actually suspect that 100 flamingos is the floor of this new population," Jerry Lorenz, Audubon Florida's state director of research, said at the time.

Florida's flamingos still make up less than 1% of the species' global population. The American flamingo is a species of low conservation concern and is protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but it has no state or federal endangered species protection. Magill has argued that the state designation would bring environmental protections along with the title, NBC 6 reported.

A long-running feud over the state bird

Efforts to unseat the mockingbird go back decades. In the 1990s, students pushed to replace it with the scrub-jay, and the campaign ran into opposition from Marion Hammer, then the National Rifle Association's influential lobbyist. At a 1999 House committee hearing, Hammer said the scrub-jay's habit of begging for food was "lazy" and showed "a welfare mentality," Florida Politics reported. 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."

What's next

Any change would require a new bill in the next regular session and, this time, action in the Senate, where two straight years of flamingo bills have stalled in committee. Miami's resolution asks lawmakers to refile the measure. With the House having already voted 112-1 for the idea, the question for supporters is whether a Senate committee chair will give it a hearing. Until then, the mockingbird keeps the title it has held for nearly a century, while the flamingo holds official status in Miami-Dade County.