So Many Sports Teams Are Named for Birds—Here’s Why (and Where to Find Them)

From the Winter 2026 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

There’s an interesting schism between the birds of National Football League and Major League Baseball teams. Three of the birds that adorn NFL helmets are fierce: falcons, eagles, and Osprey (seahawks). Meanwhile the three avian MLB teams are named for colorful backyard birds: cardinals, Blue Jays, and Baltimore Orioles.

It’s as if the birds of pro sports teams mirror comedian George Carlin’s famous comparison: Football is about marching into enemy territory. In baseball, the goal is to go home. 

Altogether there are 10 teams named for birds in professional football, baseball, and basketball leagues—from raptors to songbirds to even a seabird. Birds are natural symbols for sports teams, possessing many of the qualities admired in athletes, such as tenacity, speed, grace, and strength. And of course, a lot of birds are really cute, which makes for adorable team logos and mascots.

All of the species that fly as pro sports team symbols are common birds. For the superstitious fan, maybe seeing a team’s namesake bird on game day could convey a little extra luck. And in most cases, the avian icon is somewhat easy to see within or near their respective cities. eBird might even help you get on your team’s bird in the morning with plenty of time to find your seats at the stadium before kickoff/first pitch/tip-off.

Arizona Cardinals

More than two decades before joining the NFL as a charter member in 1920, the Cardinals professional football franchise started out as the Morgan Athletic Club in Chicago. In 1901, team owner Chris O’Brien purchased used jerseys from the University of Chicago, and when he saw the color was a faded maroon, he observed, “That’s not maroon, it’s Cardinal red!” So the team became known as the Chicago Cardinals.

In 1929, after a vote by schoolchildren, Illinois selected the Northern Cardinal as its state bird, which helped cement the cardinal as a proud symbol in the Land of Lincoln. But in 1960, the Cardinals moved to St. Louis to join the baseball Cardinals, leaving the Chicago Bears as the exclusive NFL team in the Windy City. To avoid confusion with the baseball team, the Cardinals were sometimes referred to as “The Big Red,” or more clumsily, the St. Louis football Cardinals.

Unlike the friendly looking cardinals featured on baseball uniforms, the football cardinal is angry-looking and angular, resembling a raptor more than a songbird. The team moved again in 1988, this time to Arizona, and in 2005, the cardinals redesigned the team logo to make it even meaner.

“We’ve made the beak much more predatory and much more aggressive,” team vice president Michael Bidwill said at the time. (He’s now the owner.) “The face is much more streamlined. It’s faster looking. The eye has been described as mean, we’ll say tough. We’ve taken tail feathers and given them speed, as well.”

Cardinals in Arizona

Arizona is actually home to two different types of cardinals. Historically speaking, the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), primarily an eastern species, would have been a puzzling choice as a team mascot in the Desert Southwest. Yet over the past century, due to Northern Cardinal range expansion, cardinals are becoming a common sight in parks and backyards in some parts of Arizona. In 2024, a Northern Cardinal was reported on 16% of all eBird checklists in the Phoenix metro area.

Less common—but just as much of a cardinal—is the Pyrrhuloxia (Cardinalis sinuatus), also known as the desert cardinal. Pyrrhuloxia favor drier, wilder areas of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. 

Philadelphia Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles origin story dates back more than 90 years to America’s recovery from the Great Depression—inspired by the eagle on an emblem of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration.

Philadelphia’s first NFL team, the Yellow Jackets, played in the city’s Frankford neighborhood before going out of business in 1931, a victim of the Depression and several stadium fires. Lud Wray and Bert Bell, who had been college football teammates at the University of Pennsylvania, joined forces to invest in a replacement team.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bell’s wife, the actress Frances Upton Bell, put up her husband’s $2,500 share (about $62,000 in 2025 dollars). After the Bells went to City Hall to begin taking the Yellow Jackets out of bankruptcy, Bert Bell saw the distinctive National Recovery Act placard in a window, which featured a blue eagle. Bell thought that the eagle would be a great name for the new team.

“He asked my mother what she thought,” their son, Upton Bell, told the Inquirer in 2019. “She said, ‘That’s it.’”

The Philadelphia Eagles began play in that 1933 season, and they would easily outlast the agency that inspired them. In 1935, the National Recovery Administration was invalidated by the United States Supreme Court.

Today, the Eagles’ mascot, Lincoln, is a captive Bald Eagle that entertains fans by flying through the team’s stadium before games.

Read about a fascinating initiative by the Philadelphia Eagles to sponsor a real-life bird-research project on Great Shearwaters.

Eagles in Philadelphia

Pesticides and direct persecution once led to the near-elimination of Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) from most areas of the country by the mid-20th century. In 1963, there were only about 400 eagle nests left in the Lower 48 States. Pennsylvania was no exception—with only three known eagle nests left in the state around 1980. Today there are more than 70,000 eagle nests in the contiguous U.S. [see “USFWS Report Finds Four Times More Bald Eagles in the Lower 48 States,” Summer 2021], and nests can be observed within Philadelphia’s city limits at hotspots like Pennypack on the Delaware. According to eBird data, Bald Eagles were recorded on 11% of all checklists from the Philadelphia metro area in 2024. The best place to see Bald Eagles near the City of Brotherly Love seems to be the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, where the species appeared on 48% of eBird checklists in 2024.

Less familiar as a local bird for Philly birders is the Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), which breeds no closer than northeastern Canada. However, Pennsylvania sits along a migratory corridor for this majestic raptor, and eBird data show that a few Golden Eagles are spotted in autumn at multiple hawkwatch sites in the Philly metro area, including Rose Tree Park, Ashland Nature Center, and Militia Hill at Fort Washington State Park.

Atlanta Falcons

A year before the Atlanta Falcons  made their debut as an NFL expansion team in 1966, they held a contest to choose a team name. Forty people suggested the winning entry, but it was a schoolteacher from Griffin, Georgia, named Julia Elliott who got the credit for the team name because of her descriptive reasoning: “The falcon is proud and dignified, with great courage and fight.”

Falcons beat out other proposed names such as Lancers, Firebirds, and Thunderbirds. The mascot at Griffin High School, where Elliott taught, was birdy as well—an eagle—and she was known as “Mama Eagle” because of how she championed the school’s sports.

Falcons in Atlanta

Although two other falcon species on the smaller side—Merlin and American Kestrel—can be found in Georgia, the football team most likely would identify with the renowned speed and strength of the Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus).

Peregrine Falcon is another species that was decimated by DDT and other pesticides, extirpated from the eastern United States by the mid-1960s—with only about 300 nests left in all of North America by 1975. But thanks to the banning of DDT and an extensive captive breeding and reintroduction program that put more than 6,000 young falcons out into the wild by the end of the 20th century, the continental peregrine population rebounded strongly. The Peregrine Falcon was triumphantly removed from the Endangered Species list in 1999, the same year the Atlanta Falcons made it to their first Super Bowl.

Falcons were released at several sites in Georgia in the late 1980s, mostly at cliffs and canyon sites that the birds historically favored for nesting. A nest at Tallulah Gorge in the state’s northeastern corner was the first in a wild Georgia setting in nearly a century. There were urban reintroductions of Peregrine Falcons in the Atlanta metro area as well, and at least two of these efforts resulted in successful breeding seasons. One pair of peregrines nested on a balcony on the Truist (formerly Sun Trust) Plaza tower, the second-tallest skyscraper in Atlanta, from the mid-1990s through at least 2015.

These days, a Peregrine Falcon is a challenging get for a birder in Atlanta. According to eBird, there have been only a few peregrine sightings downtown within the past year. Falcons have also been spotted out in Taylorsville, Georgia, about an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta near the intersection of Brandon Farm and Taff roads.

Seattle Seahawks

The Seattle Seahawks entered the NFL as an expansion team in 1976 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and they also got their name in a fan contest, when 153 people chose the nickname for their new team. While there isn’t an actual bird called a Seahawk, the name is essentially a stand-in for Ospreys, which are sometimes referred to as sea hawks.

Today, the Seahawks have a mascot that appears at games that is actually a buzzard—an Augur Buzzard, a kind of hawk native to Africa. Named Taima, the captive-reared buzzard was born at the World Bird Sanctuary in St. Louis. She flies around the Seahawks’ stadium before kickoff, and she’s so fan-friendly that she once landed on a fan’s head. Some players touch the bird before games for good luck.

Ospreys in Seattle

The team’s logo may have been more inspired by Indigenous mythology than any field guide, but Seattle is home to a real bird known as the “sea hawk”—the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus), a hyper-specialized fishing machine and one of the most widely distributed birds in the world.

Ospreys thrive amidst the abundant water bodies of the Puget Sound region, typically arriving from Mexico and Central America each year in early April looking for spots to build their big, ramshackle nests. Cell-phone towers and light poles will do for holding an Osprey nest, which has caused the city some consternation. In recent years Seattle has lent the birds a hand by installing nest platforms at sites like Ballard Locks, where the waters often teem with migrating salmon, making for terrific opportunities to watch Ospreys in action catching fish. According to eBird data, the Baywood Nature Trail about a 40-minute drive north of Seattle is the best Osprey-watching hotspot in the area, with the species reported on more than 60% of checklists in 2024.

Baltimore Ravens

The Baltimore Ravens have one of the most unusual team name lineages in pro sports—inspired by the famous 1845 poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, who lived for several years in Baltimore. The Ravens franchise started out as the Cleveland Browns, before owner and president Art Modell moved them to Baltimore for the 1996 season. Baltimore had been home to another NFL team, the Colts, from 1953 to 1983, before they moved to Indianapolis. Upon moving the Browns to Baltimore, Modell first checked with the now-Indianapolis Colts to see if they’d part with the name. But the Colts said no, so Modell’s team partnered with the Baltimore Sun to conduct a telephone poll that allowed fans to choose a new name for the Charm City football team. “Ravens” won in a landslide, receiving 63.4% of the tally, defeating other prospective names such as “Americans” and “Marauders”.

Baltimore football fans were thrilled that their new team’s symbol would be a bird that’s graceful, intelligent, and somewhat mystical. According to the scientists who wrote the Common Raven species account in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of the World online scholarly content platform: “Poets and authors of Western cultures have often used the raven to symbolize death, danger, and wisdom.”

Ravens in Baltimore

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Common Raven (Corvus corax) had a rough go of it in the eastern United States. Rampant shooting and deforestation drove the species from the Eastern Seaboard into remote strongholds in the mountains and far north. By the 1840s, many early readers of Poe’s poem (which was written in New York City, incidentally) would not have been able to compare his imaginative depiction to any wild bird.

To borrow an image from the poet himself, the pendulum now swings in the other direction, and ravens are returning to many parts of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. The Maryland & DC Breeding Bird Atlas project, supported by eBird, has even documented four raven nests within Baltimore’s city limits. In the city, they seem to prefer nest sites underneath large bridges. But one pair of Common Ravens stumbled upon the most fitting location of all in 2020, nesting in the rafters of M&T Bank Stadium, home of the football Ravens. Multiple eBirders have reported ravens on their checklists near the stadium over the past few years.

According to eBird, the Owings Nature Center, about a half-hour’s drive northwest of Baltimore, is the best place to see ravens in the region, with 36% of eBird checklists ticking Corvus corax there.

St. Louis Cardinals

In an odd coincidence, the St. Louis Cardinals have a similar origin story for their name as their football cousins, the Arizona Cardinals. The Cardinals were initially named for a bold shade of red, but the team would ultimately adopt the bird as its proud identity.

In 1899, the franchise’s new owner changed the name from Browns to Perfectos, and outfitted the players in red trim and socks. St. Louis Republic columnist Willie McHale heard a young woman in the stands comment, “Oh, isn’t that a lovely shade of cardinal?”—and he began using it in his copy. The name quickly caught on with fans. By the next year, the team changed its name to the Cardinals, and it has stuck for some 125 years and counting.

The franchise’s iconic “Birds on the Bat” logo didn’t debut until the 1920s. In 1921, team manager Branch Rickey (who two decades later, as president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, would sign Jackie Robinson to break baseball’s color barrier) attended an event at a local church and noticed the table decorations adorned with a pair of cardinals. They had been designed by a woman named Allie May Schmidt, inspired by the sight of a Northern Cardinal outside her window. That gave Rickey the idea to put the birds on the team’s uniform, and in 1922, the team started sporting the familiar two cardinals atop a bat. 

During the 2025 season, Cardinals players leaned into the team’s bird nickname, flapping their arms like a bird whenever they reached base. 

Cardinals in St. Louis

The Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) is one of the most ubiquitous birds in the St. Louis area, a species found on 69% of all eBird checklists from within the city in 2024 (second-most-sighted species in St. Louis, just behind the American Robin).

Yet even a familiar, common bird can hold some surprises. Just after Christmas in 2024, a St. Louis birder spotted a cardinal that appeared to be a normal adult male in every respect—except that it was yellow, instead of red, from crest to tail. The bird had an ultra-rare condition sometimes called xanthochroism, a mutation that prevents the conversion of yellow pigment (lutein) to red. The few such yellow cardinals that have been reported have become instant celebrities, drawing well-earned attention to the fascinating world of avian color biology. 

The lucky birder who saw this exceptional guest at his backyard bird feeder was Taka Yanagimoto, who also happens to be the director of photography for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. He saw it the morning after Christmas.

“I opened up the sliding door in our sunroom, and … he was probably 10 feet away,” Yanagimoto told St. Louis Public Radio. “He came closer, tilted his head, and looked at me somewhat curiously.”

Baltimore Orioles

If there was ever a city that had a bird name tailor-made for a baseball team, it was Baltimore and the Baltimore Oriole. The city’s name derives from Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, who is credited with settling the colony of Maryland in the 1600s. The Baltimore Oriole, in turn, got its name because its black-and-orange colors mirror Lord Baltimore’s coat of arms.

The Baltimore Orioles baseball team began play in 1954, after previously spending a half-century in St. Louis as the Browns (a distinct team from the 1890s St. Louis Browns). The American League approved the franchise’s move to Baltimore after the 1953 season, and the new owners chose the much flashier “Orioles” as the new name. 

The bird has been tied to Baltimore baseball dating back to a Baltimore Orioles team that played in the old American Association from 1882 to 1891. A separate Baltimore Orioles franchise was a charter member of the American League in 1901, but disbanded the next year and was replaced by a new team in New York, called the Highlanders. Today that team is known as the New York Yankees.

Orioles in Baltimore

For over a decade, the Baltimore Orioles baseball team suffered the ignominy of a birdy namesake that had been stripped of its ornithological recognition as a species.

In 1983, the American Ornithologists’ Union lumped the Baltimore Oriole of the eastern United States and the Bullock’s Oriole of the West under a single name, the “Northern Oriole.” Just like that, the baseball team now officially (according to ornithologists) bore the name of a ghost. But that did not prevent the team from winning the World Series that season.

In 1995 the AOU did an about-face and re-split the two species, based on genetic evidence that hybridization was limited and didn’t contribute to significant gene flow. Today the name Baltimore Oriole is once again a regular sight in the Charm City, both on baseball jerseys and on nearly 3,000 eBird checklists in 2024. The best place to see a Baltimore Oriole (the bird) near Baltimore, according to 2024 eBird data, is Cromwell Valley Park about 20 miles north of the city. Orioles were ticked on 30% of all checklists at that location.

Toronto Blue Jays

The Blue Jays, an expansion team that started play in 1977, got their name from a fan contest the previous year. But it wasn’t a pure vote of the people.

In August 1976, the Toronto baseball ownership group held a team name contest and received 4,000 different ideas from more than 30,000 voters. A panel of 14 judges narrowed down 10 finalists for the group’s board of directors to select a name. They went with Blue Jays, touting the name for a “strong, aggressive” bird that “dares to take on all comers.”

Some critics thought that strong and aggressive behavior was off-putting. In the Canadian newspaper Globe & Mail, columnist Christie Blatchford wrote: “One of the Blue Jay’s most repugnant habits is its fondness for eating the eggs and nestlings of other birds.”

But other Canadians were all in on the name, including Ron Thorpe, who was the president of the Toronto Field Naturalists Club back then. 

“I think it’s quite appropriate,” Thorpe told the Toronto Star at the time. “It’s a super idea. I hope the ball goes as fast as a jay can fly. It just goes to show how people are more environmentally oriented than they used to be.”

Blue Jays in Toronto

Many birdwatchers think of the Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) as a bird that appears as a lone maverick or in small gangs to wreak havoc at feeders. Not far from Toronto, however, one can witness a Blue Jay phenomenon on a radically different scale. In southern Ontario there’s a great Blue Jay migration as jays depart from their breeding grounds across southern Ontario and Quebec in the fall and fly west and south, following the north shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

During years when the crop of acorns and beechnuts has been poor, these migratory movements can reach epic proportions. An all-time eBird high count for Blue Jays—not only for Ontario, but for anywhere in the world—was logged on October 1, 2009, when observers at the Holiday Beach Migration Observatory counted the passage of a staggering 158,300 jays. 

Blue Jays are quite abundant around Toronto as well, appearing on 37% of all eBird checklists from within the metro area. The best place to regularly see a Blue Jay seems to be just beyond the Toronto city limits at the Rosetta McClain Gardens in the community of Scarborough. More than eight in 10 eBird checklists from that hotspot in 2024 included a Blue Jay.

Atlanta Hawks

The Atlanta Hawks, familiar to basketball fans with the team’s logo of a fierce-looking hawk profile, weren’t initially named for a bird. They began play in 1949 as a charter member of the NBA from the Mississippi River towns of Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa, and they were called Tri-Cities Blackhawks—an homage to the Sauk Tribal Chief Black Hawk. After two seasons, the franchise moved to Milwaukee in 1951 and became just the “Hawks,” with a generic hawk perched on a basketball, its wings outstretched.

The team moved again in 1955 to become the St. Louis Hawks, and after a couple of seasons the logo changed to a caricature of an angry hawk holding a basketball. After 13 seasons, the Hawks migrated again, this time south to Atlanta, where they have played since 1968.

Hawks in Atlanta

“Hawks” isn’t a very specific team name as far as bird identification. The Atlanta area hosts three common species of year-round hawk residents—Red-tailed, Red-shouldered, and Cooper’s Hawks—along with one breeding species (Broad-winged Hawk) that departs for the tropics each fall, and another species (Sharp-shinned Hawk) that migrates in from the north to take its place.

To muddy the waters further, Georgia birders can expect to see birds colloquially known as Fish Hawk (Osprey), Marsh Hawk (Northern Harrier), Duck Hawk (Peregrine Falcon), Pigeon Hawk (Merlin), Sparrow Hawk (American Kestrel), and Common Nighthawk (of the avian family nightjars). 

To experience the fullest variety of hawks in the Atlanta area, birders can head to the eBird hotspot at Panola Mountain State Park in the fall just a half-hour’s drive southwest from downtown. This well-preserved granite summit offers a terrific vantage point for migration, where an area-leading 16 raptor species have been seen. According to eBird data in 2024, the Panola Mountain area is a good bet to see Red-shouldered and Red-tailed Hawks (46% and 37% of eBird checklists in the area, respectively).

New Orleans Pelicans

The 1988 NBA expansion team originally called the Charlotte Hornets kept its name when it moved to New Orleans in 2002, but “New Orleans Hornets” never quite sounded right. So in 2013, after considering 100 different alternative names, team owners switched to “Pelicans.” It was a no-brainer. After all, Louisiana is known as the Pelican State, and the Brown Pelican is the state bird. The bird is even the centerpiece of the Louisiana flag, sitting in a nest feeding three chicks, above the words “UNION JUSTICE CONFIDENCE.”

“The pelican is a symbol for our city and region,” then-owner Tom Benson said when the team name change took effect after the final game of the 2012–2013 season.

The New Orleans Pelicans aren’t the first sports team in the city to adopt the bird as its name. The Big Easy had a minor league baseball team with the same nickname from 1887 to 1959, and again in 1977.

Pelicans in New Orleans

A modern-day visitor to New Orleans won’t have to wait long to encounter a Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis)—cruising down the Mississippi River, plunging into Lake Pontchartrain, or loafing along the shores of the lakes in City Park. Brown Pelicans have been documented on about a fifth (17%) of all eBird checklists from the New Orleans metro area.

But when the Brown Pelican was formally named as the state bird back in the 1960s, there was hardly a pelican to be found in all of Louisiana. Eggshell-thinning pesticides had annihilated the big breeding colonies on the state’s barrier islands. 

The banning of DDT and an aggressive reintroduction program eventually brought the iconic species back, only to be dealt another blow by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. A decade of coastal restoration work funded by billions of dollars in penalties on BP and its business partners has helped pelicans in Louisiana rebound again, with thriving colonies on Queen Bess Island and on islands in Breton National Wildlife Refuge, on the outskirts of the New Orleans metro area.