What you haven’t got is huge popularity. When about 50,000 people voted in the magazine’s online poll, the gray jay finished third, behind the loon, which adorns Canada’s one-dollar coin, and the snowy owl.

“I know a lot of Canadians didn’t know what the gray jay was, and were asking: ‘Do I see it in my feeder?’” Professor Bird said. “And there are still people angry because they felt the popular vote was not honored.”

Mr. Kylie, the editor of Canadian Geographic, said that the loon and snowy owl were excluded from final consideration because they were already used as symbols by the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

He said the relative unfamiliarity of the gray jay, also known as the whiskey jack, weighed on the plus side, not the minus. “We have an animal symbol, which is the beaver,” he said by way of analogy. “I would say that most Canadians don’t see a beaver in a given year. The fact that some Canadians don’t know this bird, I think, is all the more reason to have it proclaimed the national bird.”

Then you have the spelling of the bird’s names. Following the usual Canadian style, it ought to be called the grey jay, with an e, or the whisky jack, without one. The “gray” and “whiskey” spellings are seen (and resented) as Americanisms.

The issue particularly vexes Dan Strickland, who began researching the bird as a graduate student at the Université de Montréal in late 1960s and continues to do so even after retiring as chief naturalist at Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario.

The spellings, he said, come from the American Ornithologists’ Union, which took it upon itself to determine official names for all the birds in North America. The union gave the species the Latin name Perisoreus canadensis, and at first, from 1886 to 1910, referred to it in English as the Canada jay. The union dropped all English bird names in 1910, but brought them back later, and the current ones stem from a sweeping revision of its naming system in 1957.