State Symbols
- State Motto: North to the Future
- Nicknames: "The Last Frontier" or "Land of the Midnight Sun" or "Seward's Icebox"
- State bird: Willow Ptarmigan, adopted by the Territorial Legislature in 1955. It is a small (15–17 inches) Arctic grouse that lives among willows and on open tundra and muskeg. Plumage is brown in summer, changing to white in winter. The Willow Ptarmigan is common in much of Alaska.
- State fish: King Salmon, adopted 1962.
- State flower: wild/native Forget-me-not, adopted by the Territorial Legislature in 1917. It is a perennial that is found throughout Alaska, from Hyder to the Arctic Coast, and west to the Aleutians.
- State fossil: Woolly Mammoth, adopted 1986.
- State gem: Jade, adopted 1968.
- State insect: Four-spot skimmer dragonfly, adopted 1995.
- State land mammal: Moose, adopted 1998.
- State marine mammal: Bowhead Whale, adopted 1983.
- State mineral: Gold, adopted 1968.
- State song: "Alaska's Flag"
- State sport: Dog Mushing, adopted 1972.
- State tree: Sitka Spruce, adopted 1962.
- State dog: Alaskan Malamute, adopted 2010.
- State soil: Tanana, adopted unknown.
Read more about this topic: Alaska
Famous quotes containing the words state and/or symbols:
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Luckless is the country in which the symbols of procreation are the objects of shame, while the agents of destruction are honored! And yet you call that member your pudendum, or shameful part, as if there were anything more glorious than creating life, or anything more atrocious than taking it away.”
—Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac (1619–1655)