Wyoming State Bird: Western Meadowlark

Because Wyoming made the choice before the symbol became crowded. When lawmakers adopted the meadowlark in February 1927, they were not copying a bird already claimed across the Plains. Oregon, Nebraska, Montana, Kansas, and North Dakota all followed later.

Today that can be easy to miss. Once five more states adopted the same bird, Wyoming's original claim got buried under the shared-symbol map. But the direction of influence ran outward from Wyoming, not toward it.

Even the current statute wording reflects the early stage. Wyoming law says meadowlark, genus Sturnella rather than committing to the specific Western Meadowlark name — a broader claim that fits a state staking the first position rather than slotting into a category someone else defined.

Wyoming Game and Fish traces the first push to an essay by a Thermopolis schoolgirl who argued Wyoming should honor the meadowlark — a real local beginning rather than a vague statewide mood.

The idea did not stay in the classroom. Grace Raymond Hebard, one of the best-known public figures at the University of Wyoming, took up the cause, and Senator Robert Hale introduced the bill.

That route into law gives Wyoming a different civic texture from a mass referendum story. The bird moved from one school essay to one determined advocate and then into the Legislature.

Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Oregon all adopted the meadowlark after Wyoming. The bird works as a symbol for open-country, grassland-and-plains identity — the landscape those states share. Wyoming's 1927 choice demonstrated that the connection held, and later states reached the same conclusion independently.

None of them cited Wyoming as a precedent. But the pattern shows what Wyoming's early adoption did in practice: it established the meadowlark as the default bird for a particular kind of western identity before that identity had been formally named.

The clearest sign of how far that spread went is the state that eventually said no. When Washington ran its own bird selection, lawmakers backed away from the meadowlark specifically because too many other states already used it. By then Wyoming had been holding the original claim for decades.