Seattle's Misnamed Sports Franchise

Years ago, I travelled to Seattle with my lovely wife, Julia, and that west coast city became one of my favourites. Many of my in-laws — Julia’s parents and two older sisters with their families — live in the scenic suburbs outside Seattle. The green splendour surrounding Seattle is wondrous, but the city itself is gorgeous, full of culture, fabulous restaurants, and undeniably exciting sports teams (no matter how much I may like to deny them).

The Seattle Kraken are professional hockey’s latest expansion phenom, with a logo borrowed from the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver Canada, just a three-hour drive north. The Seattle Mariners are my second favourite Major League Baseball team, as they entered the league in 1977, the same spring as my beloved Toronto Blue Jays. Listening to Mariner/Blue Jay games on the radio is a favourite childhood memory from my summers in the late-70s early-80s. The time difference between Washington State and Ontario meant that evening games started at 10 pm for me, and I would drift off in bed to the game commentary, a comforting habit I maintain to this day.

The Seattle Sounders (named after the spectacular inland seaways of the Puget Sound) in Major League Soccer are established enemies of my Toronto FC soccer club. The two squads have contested for the League championship three times in the last decade, with Seattle coming out on top twice, dammit.

And then there are the National Football League Seattle Seahawks.

I don’t have much time or patience for American football. It’s way too slow, full of unnecessary delay, and lacks the overall athleticism and artistry of real football… the kind played around the world with a round ball and eleven players per side. But that Seahawk’s logo? That is an enviable bit of sports branding, capturing the angry intensity of the game itself, the natural beauty of the surrounding area, with an artistic nod to the indigenous history of a municipality named after a celebrated Native American leader.

And, for the ornithologically obsessed you can’t go wrong with a bird on your gear.

But what the hell is a Seahawk, anyway?

This was my question on acquiring my first bit of NFL swag, a cap for a friend in Toronto who immediately dubbed it “the angry Blue Jay.” No… not a jay, or any kind of corvid for that matter. It unquestionably has a look similar to some of the raven iconography I’ve seen on the west coast of Canada. Bill Reid sculptures come to mind. But it must be called a hawk for a reason, and it certainly has the steeply hooked beak of most raptors.

Turns out, there is no bird officially named a seahawk, but a couple birds that do enough hunting around the salt water of the Puget Sound for them to stand in. None of them sport blue and gray face colouration and moss green eyes. The mighty Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) does not approximate the lines and markings on the Seahawk. The NFL Seahawks do have an actual live bird mascot they bring out at home games, but it is an Augur Buzzard (Buteo augur augur), which is not native to the Pacific Northwest and is in fact an African bird that mostly hunts on land.

If any bird is actually appropriate to the logo it’s the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus). These large, fish-eating hawks breed and hunt along the Washington State coast, and sport the dark eyeliner and extreme beak of the Seahawk logo. Osprey populations have rebounded since the banning of certain pesticides that were thinning their eggshells and poisoning the birds themselves. They are now considered a low conservation concern.

So why not the Seattle Ospreys? Only the marketers know for sure.

 “At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.”

                                                             — Chief Seattle, 1854

See here for a post I did about books I’ve recently read. I didn’t send it out to subscribers as it was not bird-related in the least. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to get all the posts as a newsletter, even the bookish ones.