Indiana State Bird: Northern Cardinal

Indiana Code 1-2-8-1 names the state bird as the Red Bird or Cardinal — not the Northern Cardinal, which is the standard modern field-guide name. That phrasing reflects how the bird was commonly known in Indiana in 1933, when the term Northern Cardinal had not yet fully displaced older vernacular names.

The statute also carries an older scientific label alongside the common name, another sign that it was written at a particular moment in naming history and has not been updated since. What survives in Indiana law is the public language of the era: the name people actually used, not a retrospective standardization.

By the time Indiana designated the cardinal in 1933, both Kentucky (1926) and Illinois (1929) had already done so. Indiana was not the regional pioneer. It was formalizing a bird that neighboring states had already adopted — which suggests the choice reflected a shared Midwestern recognition of the cardinal rather than a deliberate effort to claim something new.

That context matters because it reframes the Indiana designation. The 1933 act is less about innovation than about settling into a regional pattern. The cardinal was already a known Midwestern state symbol; Indiana joined that pattern and wrote it into code.

Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia all share the Northern Cardinal with Indiana. Among those seven, most statutes use modern bird-book language. Indiana's law is the one that still reads like it was written for the public rather than for a field guide.

The Red Bird or Cardinal wording is not a trivial detail. It marks Indiana's statute as an artifact of how the bird was named and known in the 1930s Midwest — and because the law has never been updated to match current nomenclature, it preserves that older register intact.