It seems appropriate that the songwriter of the classic “Listen to the Mockingbird” (1885) used a pseudonym. For “Mockingbird,” Septimus Winner became Alice Hawthorne, one of his aliases.
The northern mockingbird has an avian version of a pseudonym. It can mimic many dozens of birds and other sounds, thus the common name as well as the Latin, Mimus polyglottos, or many-tongued mimic.
The master mimics are seldom heard in Washington because they are rare visitors, but on a recent trip to Maryland, I was reminded of the variety of bird songs that I miss out here. I do, however, have limited appreciation for the unmated male mockingbird’s penchant for singing, with vigor, through spring nights.
Although I didn’t see many species, I certainly heard far more than were camped out on my parents’ acre, thanks to a mockingbird who had claimed the territory.
The master of medley tossed off song after song after song of other species. He uses more of the muscles in the syrinx (the vocal organ) than most other birds and definitely has an ear for music.
Researchers have found that a mockingbird’s song list easily exceeds 150; The longer they live, the more songs and sounds they add, sometimes in the hundreds. Their repertoire includes other sounds, too.
Recordings and first-hand reports have documented mockingbirds imitating cell phones, crickets, dogs, alarm clocks, frogs and a squeaky wheelbarrow; if there’s a repetitive sound near a mockingbird, it may get absorbed into the set list.
I’m not the only one taken by this bird. It’s the state bird for Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas.
American Indians were familiar with mockingbirds. The mockingbird brought the gift of language in Hopi myth, and an Algonquin tribe’s name for the mockingbird translates to “400 tongues.”
President Thomas Jefferson kept one as a pet and, up to the early 1900s, mockingbirds were sold as caged birds.
In some avian species, attractiveness is in the breeding plumage, ability to “dance” or perform aerial displays. The somewhat drab gray-and-white mockingbird, about the size of a robin on Slim-Fast, gets no help from feathers or feet, so he depends on his voice.
To the female, vocalizations are the male’s most attractive quality. The female (theoretically) “senses” that an extensive repertoire signals higher levels of testosterone, experience and territory. Thus the best mimics mate earlier than those with a limited list and often mate several times a year. The female has two to four broods each season.
Testosterone also translates into an aggressive nest-guarding attitude, a nest that the male has had the biggest part in building. I’ve been dive-bombed when innocently walking too near a nest, and I’ve had a mocker flash very close to my face.
Mockingbird eggs take a couple of weeks to hatch, and the fledglings leave the nest in about 12 days. A new brood calls for a new nest.
Mockingbirds don’t migrate, so territory and fledglings are everything. Staying at home during the winter gives them a territorial advantage come spring.
The northern mockingbird’s diet includes insects, grasshoppers, seeds, berries and other fruits. I’ve seen them suddenly stop while foraging on the ground and raise and close their wings, theoretically to startle a living food source.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee summed up a mockingbird’s life: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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