Choosing our avian mascots

IN 1961 Nelle Harper Lee, ‘the Jane Austen of Southern Alabama’, won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

The book’s spectacular success brought the name of this American songbird to the attention of the world. The hero gives his children air rifles for Christmas. They can shoot ‘all the blue jays they want’, he tells them, but ‘it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird’. Harper Lee named him Atticus Finch; birds symbolise innocence and decency in this tale of racially-motivated injustice. The mocking bird sings loudly, repeating phrases, (just as song thrushes do in Ireland) and it mimics other birds, mammals and man-made sounds. Much loved, it’s the official mascot of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Texas.

In America, every state has its representative bird. What if each Irish county were to choose one? Dublin, despite its multitude of people, wouldn’t have a problem; brent geese, rather scarce a few decades ago, fly daily over the city. Once confined to estuaries, they frequent parks and sports grounds up to several kilometres inland; their little beaks can deal only with closely-cropped swards.