Spark Bird: Jay Inslee and the Western Meadowlark

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Spark Bird: Jay Inslee And The Western Meadowlark
Written by Jonese Franklin

This is BirdNote.

Former Washington Governor Jay Inslee has been around birds his entire life. But he says it wasn’t until his early 30s that a bird really caught his attention.

 Jay Inslee: We'd moved from western Washington, you know, a wet kind of urban environment to eastern Washington, a dry sagebrush, apple trees environment. And we heard this meadowlark sitting right on top of this little, unused telephone pole outside of our farmhouse that we had.

         [Western Meadowlark]

This was a Western Meadowlark, a robin-sized bird with a vibrant yellow breast and a spectacular song.

Jay Inslee: And it is just melodic. That's the word I would use. I'm not a musician. I know virtually nothing about music, but I think that if, if Mendelssohn and Brahms and Brandi Carlile got together to design a bird song, that's what they would write.

         [Western Meadowlark]

Jay Inslee: Every year we knew it was spring when that bird, or its subsequent generations came, I swear to the same telephone pole and just ripped out this incredible song that we could hear, you know, 150 yards away.

Over time, Inslee grew to love the meadowlark’s song not only for its melody, but for how it connected him to the natural world.

Jay Inslee: I would describe it, of summoning us from winter to spring. So it’s like it announces the change of the seasons.

         [Western Meadowlark]

Is there a bird that inspired you to pay closer attention to/love nature? Tell us about it at BirdNote.org.

For BirdNote, I’m Mark Bramhill.

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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Ariana Remmel
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Western Meadowlark ML556671411 recorded by Thomas Bancroft.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2026 BirdNote August 2026
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# sparkbird-29-2026-08-25        sparkbird-29