Does Naming an Official State Animal Impact Its Conservation Status?

By designating an official animal, cities and states can raise awareness for at-risk wildlife, although sometimes the attention comes too late

By Cassidy Randall
Conservation
Sep 26, 2024

A National Park Service conservator prepares Monarch (above), a preserved specimen considered one of California’s last grizzlies, for a 2024 exhibition at the California Academy of Sciences timed to the centennial of the bears’ extirpation in the state. A nēnē (below) stretches its wings in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island.

SPORTS TEAMS AREN’T THE ONLY ENTITIES WITH MASCOTS. Every state in the nation, not to mention the United States itself, has designated official wildlife species. These animals often are chosen for their regional prevalence, their uniqueness or because they share traits—real or perceived—with their adopters.

Even some cities have joined in. Last year San Francisco named the wild parrot its official animal, a nonnative believed to have naturalized after escaping from a pet store, emblemizing the city’s deep immigrant history.

But given the current biodiversity crisis, with 467 plant and animal species declared globally extinct between 2009 and 2019—although some may have disappeared earlier—and scientists announcing Earth’s sixth mass extinction, we began to wonder: How many official animals have become endangered since they were designated?

One of the most famous examples offers up a conservation success story. The bald eagle, our national bird since 1782, had dwindled to 417 breeding pairs in the Lower 48 by the 1960s due to factors including hunting and use of the pesticide DDT. The bird’s national profile rallied attention to its status, and after years of recovery efforts, bald eagles were removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered species in 2007.

The eagle was already our national bird when its decline began, but designating an at-risk animal “official” can help its cause. In 1957, Hawai‘i named the nēnē, a goose endemic to the islands, its state bird. After decades of hunting by humans and imported mongooses, only 30 remained in the wild at the time. Ten years later, it was added to the federal endangered species list.

“You feel a special connection when it’s a state bird. It’s an animal you take pride in,” says Raymond McGuire, a biologist specializing in nēnē restoration. Before he started working for Hawai‘i’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife, he had never seen a nēnē in the wild.

With more than 3,200 nēnē statewide by 2019, the bird was downlisted from endangered to threatened, although it’s still the rarest goose in the world. A captive breeding program that ran from 1949 to 2011 is largely credited with the successful rebound. “It’s a great story of how, when you put that effort into protecting a species, you can bring them back from the brink of extinction,” McGuire says.

California is the only state whose emblematic animal—the grizzly bear, appearing on both its flag and seal—has gone locally extinct to date. Before the gold rush began in 1848, an estimated 10,000 grizzlies roamed California. But in less than a century, following aggressive hunting, poisoning and trapping, the last grizzly was glimpsed in California in 1924, in Sequoia National Park. In 1953, the state named the grizzly its official animal.

While the federal government has announced plans to restore grizzlies to Washington state’s North Cascades, Peter Alagona, professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founder of the California Grizzly Research Network, says it’s unlikely the bears will make their way naturally to California. They’re slow movers, and there’s too much habitat fragmentation in between. The state would need to make its own push to reintroduce, and no efforts have materialized yet.

In the meantime, having an extirpated animal as the state symbol is “a great opportunity for education and conversation,” Alagona says. “And I’m absolutely convinced that this animal has much more to teach us than most of us understand.”

A more recent designation provides a reverse example: The buffalo received its official recognition due to its conservation success. Once numbering in the millions, the animal was nearly wiped out in the 19th century by settlers and the U.S. government, whose policy of decimating buffalo was intended to devastate Indigenous People. (Read more in “Forming a Bond: Behind the Scenes of 'A Buffalo Story.'”) A conservation effort led by the InterTribal Buffalo Council, Yellowstone National Park, conservation groups and government agencies brought the animals back from near extinction so that by 2016—when Congress passed the National Bison Legacy Act, designating the animals as our national mammal—around 30,000 wild buffalo once again roamed the American West.

Spotlighting an official animal in the name of conservation could be key in Indiana, where the state insect is the Say’s firefly. Like most fireflies, it is struggling due to light pollution.

“Insects are declining as a whole, and fireflies are one of those species where the decline is more seen and felt because of their luminous behavior,” says Sérgio Henriques, invertebrate conservation coordinator for the Global Center for Species Survival at the Indianapolis Zoo. He calls fireflies “Indiana’s wild lights.”

No population estimates of Say’s fireflies exist—an absence of data Henriques is working to address—but “I can tell you it was considered one of the most common fireflies 100 years ago, and now it’s lucky if it’s seen once a year in the entire state,” he says.

Fortunately, “it’s not too late to reverse the loss of this beautiful natural spectacle,” Henriques says. “There’s an opportunity here, and I would expect the charismatic species that is linked to the identity of the state will drive people to action.”

Cassidy Randall is a freelance writer in Montana telling stories about the environment, adventure and the West.