A spirited debate this week in Maine about which chickadee should be the state’s official bird has sparked a discussion about the nature of identity, Northern versus Southern Maine, climate change, tourism, license plates — and even bipartisan insults aimed at Massachusetts.
On Wednesday in Augusta, the State and Local Government Committee heard testimony on a bill that calls for more specificity about Maine’s state bird.
The problem lawmakers are hoping to solve: In 1927, Maine legislators designated the chickadee as the state bird. But they didn’t specify which chickadee. This struck Nick Lund, a birder who works at Maine Audubon, as, well, bird-brained.
“The chickadee isn’t a bird, but a family of birds,” Lund said. “It is like saying the state pizza is pizza or the state dog is a dog.”
Lund brought the issue to the attention of the local press, and soon Representative Betty Austin, a Skowhegan Democrat, was on it. Working with fourth-graders at Margaret Chase Smith Elementary School in her hometown, Austin filed a bill asking the Legislature to pick between the more rare boreal chickadee, which is native to the state’s remote northern woods, or the more common black-capped chickadee found all over the state, but more so in the south.
For years, some lawmakers incorrectly assumed the state bird was the black-capped chickadee. It’s featured on the state’s default license plate — as iconic as “Vacationland” across the bottom.
But now that the topic is up for debate, one strike against the black-capped chickadee is its lofty status in Massachusetts.
As Brian Olsen, a professor of biology and ecology at the University of Maine, put it at the public hearing: “The other state that claims the black-capped chickadee, as has been said, is Massachusetts. And I’ll leave that at that.”
If “that” was unclear, Lund, a native Mainer, will helpfully clear it up.
“Maine left the Massachusetts in 1820, and we still root for Massachusetts sports teams, but you know Maine came up with the idea of the chickadee first,” Lund said, noting that Massachusetts designated the black-capped bird as its official bird in 1941.
“So,” he reasoned, “maybe if we pick the black-capped one, Massachusetts should just let us have it and come up with something else.”
Normally, the office of the Massachusetts governor doesn’t comment on pending legislation in other states, but perhaps there was too much squawking from the neighbors up north to resist.
“As the birthplace of the American revolution and home to the cradle of liberty, every state follows Massachusetts’ footsteps to some extent, so it’s not surprising our former Massachusetts residents to the north also want to celebrate the beautiful black-capped chickadee,” said Tim Buckley, Governor Charlie Baker’s senior adviser.
All 50 states have picked a state bird of some sort. Massachusetts actually has two: The wild turkey is the state’s official game bird.
Other than Maine, Utah is the only other state that has an ambiguous official bird: a generic seagull. Most Utahns believe the designation is for the California seagull, which gobbled up swarms of crickets that were destroying crops in 1848.
Austin, the author of the Maine bill, said she doesn’t have a favorite of the two chickadees, but notes that choosing the boreal may have a fiscal impact, because it would mean replacing the black-capped bird that’s depicted on the license plates.
Then again, picking the boreal could bring in money if it’s marketed correctly to tourists and birders as the place where this unique bird can be found — as opposed to the black-capped chickadee, which can be seen as far south as West Virginia.
Another consideration: climate change. One estimate suggests that due to global warming, the boreal chickadee will have all left Maine for Canada by 2050. Should lawmakers think long-term? Or should they pick the boreal and make an effort to tackle climate change and stand by their symbol?
A lot of this is expected to be sorted out in the next few weeks. The State and Local Government Committee will hold a work session, after which it could recommend the boreal or the black-capped chickadee — or just leave it unclear and move on to other matters deemed more important.
Senator Ned Claxton, cochairman of the joint committee with Representative Danny Martin, said he will propose a different solution.
“My idea is to name both the boreal and the black-capped as state birds, plural,” Claxton said. “The boreal seems more unique to our identity, but the issue with the black-capped is that while you can see it in every county in Maine it will upset certain populations locally because of its affiliation with Massachusetts.”
Claxton doesn’t have the black-capped chickadee on his license plates. He bought the popular conservation plate featuring a loon, as in the state bird of Minnesota.
James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his Ground Game newsletter on politics:http://pages.email.bostonglobe.com/GroundGameSignUp.