Mockingbird

 

“Mockin’bird, now, everybody, have you heard?

He’s gonna buy me a mockin’bird.
If that mockin’bird don’t sing,

He’s gonna buy me a diamond ring.”

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That song, made famous in my youth by Carly Simon and James Taylor and given a recent resurgence in popularity by Crystal and Toby Keith, talks about a little bird that often doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

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I recently took Mom’s dog, Poochie, out for a walk.  The furry little lady guided me down the alley behind Mom’s house, visiting every bush, tree, fence post, trash can, and bump in the ground along the way.

During one such pause I heard a bird singing in a neighboring tree.  I didn’t recognize the song at first and looked to see who was singing.  Then I caught the notes of a robin’s song and thought I had it.

The notes changed again and I knew.  I was positive who I was looking for.  A moment later movement in the tree caught my eye.  There he was.

The bird hadn’t stood out to me because I was looking for the rusty red of a robin’s breast instead of the gray of the northern mockingbird.

Don’t get me wrong, our native mockingbird is not an ugly bird; he just doesn’t have the flash of a robin or bluebird or cardinal, so he doesn’t really stand out against a gray tree on a gray day.

But the plain looking little bird has one trait that can make him conspicuous.  As the name implies, the mockingbird imitates the sounds made by other songbirds, and has also been known to mimic insects, amphibians, and to even imitate an occasional mechanical noise.  I read about one that imitated a chainsaw and another who copied a telephone ringing so well that a homeowner kept jumping up to see who was calling him.  I remember, as a child, searching around my grandmother’s house most of one day trying to find the lost kitten I was sure I heard.  It turned out the kitty had gray feathers.

The bird can have a repertoire of as many as 200 different sounds; so many that scientists say they may sing one particular sequence of notes as rarely as once in a year.

Mockingbirds sing so enthusiastically that they can frequently be heard performing well into the night.

Territorial and protective, they can sometimes be observed “dive-bombing” the neighborhood cats and dogs, sometimes even people who get too close to their nests.  They rarely cause any harm however.  When they nose-dive at something, they flare away at the last moment, and white feathers on their tails and wings show them to be a little less plain that one might think at first.

Interestingly, mockingbirds seem to be seasonally omnivorous.  During the summer their diet consists largely of insects, spiders, small reptiles, amphibians, crayfish and fruit, but they live almost exclusively on fruit still clinging to trees and bushes during the winter.  They won’t pass up mealworms left in a birdfeeder by kind humans though.

Our northern mockingbird is a pleasant little critter who really doesn’t hurt anything, other than pestering cats at times or dropping purple spots on clean cars when the mulberries are ripe, and their singing can add a pleasant backdrop to a beautiful day.

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In closing I have to point out that whoever came up with the idea of giving his sweetheart a mockingbird as the first gift on a list of things probably wanted to earn lots of points without a big investment.  As much as the mockingbird loves to hear its own voice, the chances are slim that the man will ever have to make good on that offer of the diamond ring, “if that mockin’bird don’t sing”.

Yeah.  Like that’ll ever happen.

 

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