Kill a Mockingbird? Florida Politicians Seek To Replace Perfectly Good State Symbol

Barely Present Except in Plastic, Pink Flamingo Nominated as Successor

A pair of state lawmakers has proposed replacing the State Bird, the mockingbird, with the Flamingo.

The mockingbird isn’t really “mocking” the songs of other birds. It’s not like, “Hey, your songs (stink), and I’m gonna mock them by recording a bad cover album.” The reality is that Florida’s State Bird is misnamed.

It’s not mocking anything. It’s impersonating the neighbors (and the occassional car alarm).

The Florida State Bird should be called the identity-theft bird.

Since 1927, this nasty little con-bird has been the perfect state bird for Florida, USA Fraud Capital.

Let’s start with the Fountain of Youth, a fake 16th century miracle cure, rumors of which helped convince theretofore healthy Spaniards to settle Florida’s malarial coast and die young.

(Yeah, M-birds are good singers alright, but if you don’t believe they are nasty too, you haven’t seen their merciless aerial combat against other honest, hardworking birds such as crows and buzzards, but that is besides the point.)

Fast forward to the early 1800s. Warner Thompson came down from New York and got rich selling Florida swamp land to gullible folks, promising there was gold and jewels in places that had no rocks at all. In modern sales parlance Thompson was a “closer.” Florida is home to many closers today. I bet you know a few.

Ponzi Dreams

For a while, Florida was home to the most famous con-man in history—Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi. Yup. That guy—the prototype for Bernie Madoff.

Massachusetts put him in prison for two years, then ran him out. Naturally, the Italian emigrant relocated to the state where every grifter goes for a second chance, landing in Jacksonville. The Jacksonville Times-Union picks up the story:

Ponzi was afraid of another indictment and decided to migrate to a friendlier environment where his talents would be appreciated…In 1925, he set up shop in the Springfield section of Jacksonville where he launched the Charpon Land Syndicate, selling tiny tracts of swamp land in Columbia County. He promised investors a 200 percent return in 60 days.

Ponzi was soon indicted by a Duval County grand jury, tried and sentenced to a year in prison, but he posted a $1,500 bond and skipped town. He fled to Texas where he tried to leave the country disguised as a crewman on a merchant ship, but he was caught and returned to Massachusetts where he served seven more years in prison before being deported to Italy.

To my original point, Florida ranks first in the nation in identify theft. And, according to the FBI, Florida ranked second in the United States for fraud as a whole with 42,792 victims who lost $844 million in 2022. Only California (with 16 million more people) came in ahead.¹

Culture of the Con

Florida-haters like to say that no one comes here for the “opera or the education,” but they would be wrong to say the state lacks culture. Again from the Times-Union:

Endlessly creative crooks come up with fake Jamaican lotteries, false marriages for immigration purposes, mediocre seafood marketed as better seafood, insurance rip-offs from fake accidents and fires—even foreign substandard cheese passed off as domestic top shelf. But the big money is in a trio of major fraud trends: Medicare, mortgage and identity theft-tax refunds.

When a Republican guy whose company had to pay $1.7 billion fine for Medicare fraud won the governorship and then a U.S. senate seat, Florida Democrats were like deer in the headlights. As a witness, that candidate had repeatedly pleaded the Fifth rather than risk incriminating himself by testifying truthfully.

He went on to sink some of his enormous CEO earnings into his campaigns, even as Dems protested, “But, but…the fraud!” All the while, a decisive segment of the electorate was thinking, “Well played, Rick Scott. Well played.”

Now come Rep. Jim Mooney, R-Islamorada, and Rep. Linda Chaney, R-St. Pete Beach, who recently filed House Bill 753 to designate the American flamingo as the Florida State Bird.

There had been talk of other replacements to the M-bird, including the scrub jay, osprey, roseate spoonbill, white ibis, swallow-tailed kite and wood stork. (Jokers suggested the “construction crane.”)

Plastic Fantastic

We see flamingos everywhere—plastic replicas galore, in advertising, in place names, the logo for the state lottery. There are 2,300 Florida businesses with “flamingo” in their name.

You can see a few live ones caged at the Jacksonville Zoo. What Florida lacks is a breeding population in the wild. For that, you need to travel to Cuba, Mexico or the remote Bahamian island of Great Inagua.

There are so few flamingos in Florida, mockingbirds say they have turned to YouTube for lessons on how to imitate them—funky honking, grunting and growling sounds.

Florida’s native flamingos were wiped out by the thousands in 19th century Florida “for their plumes, skin and meat,” according to one account.

So rare are Florida flamingo sightings that they made headlines in September after Hurricane Idalia blew a bunch of them as far north as Tampa Bay, probably from Cuba.

So, on the premise that absence makes the heart grow fonder, Florida lawmakers want to replace a bird that perfectly represents Florida history and culture with one that barely lives here.

Mooney and Chaney would probably call it rebranding. Sounds like just another con job to me.

1. In case you are still skeptical about Florida as USA Fraud Capital, go ahead and Google “Ponzi Scheme Florida” and click on the news button on the bar at the top of the page. Dozens of stories will appear; many of the cases are quite recent.