On the Fly – Everybody, Have You Heard?

The mockingbirds started singing about three weeks ago. They needed a few days to get warmed up, but now as you walk down our major boulevards, it’s like listening to street musicians in Galway: as you move from one bird’s territory to the next, one song fades out and another peaks.

The northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) is the state bird of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, and it lives all over most of North America. There are plenty in Contra Costa County. This bird is very happy in the suburbs and thrives on all the fruiting shrubs and trees we’ve planted.

Some mockingbirds from the colder parts of the continent migrate south for the winter, but most stay in the same place year-round. We tend not to notice them till spring, though, when the males start trying to attract mates. They aren’t, after all, much to look at. Adults are gray-brown on the back and cream-colored on the chest and belly. Males and females look pretty much alike. They’re about the size of robins but more slender, and their tails are long. Their most notable feature is their large white wing patches, visible when they swoop down out of a tree to grab a few insects from the ground.

Mockingbirds mimic not only the songs of other birds, but squeaky gates, car alarms, ringtones, and so on. Over the course of his lifetime, a mockingbird may learn as many as two hundred songs, and this is how he attracts a mate. A large repertoire indicates long life and hence superior survival skills, an attractive quality to a female looking to perpetuate her DNA. Or, ornithologists speculate, it indicates cleverness, another attractive trait. Either way, guitar players thinking about learning a new riff or two should take note.

Speaking of survival skills, recent studies indicate that mockingbirds, like crows, can recognize individual humans. Students of University of Florida researcher Doug Levey loitered near nests, touching them repeatedly over a period of four days. Though the mockingbirds ignored other students, they soon learned to dive-bomb the apparent malefactors whenever they walked by.

Mockingbirds sing from late winter through August, and again in the fall; sometimes they have separate repertoires for the two seasons. When a male finds a mate, the singing quiets down. (Females sing too, but more quietly and not competitively.) Most of the birds that sing at night are unmated males, and they sing more during a full moon. A male who has not found a mate will keep trying but may eventually abandon his territory and try somewhere else.

Not surprisingly, given its vast range and virtuosity, the mockingbird shows up throughout American culture, from Mother Goose to Harper Lee, from Inez Foxx, Carly Simon, and Taj Mahal to Eminem and Rob Thomas, and from poet John Rollin Ridge, who called it the “Sarcastic Poet of the bowery clime,” to Charles Bukowski. Louis Armstrong’s version of “Listen to the Mockingbird,” recorded c. 1952 but written c. 1855, is a swinging surprise.

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The second photo is also on the subject of mocking, but this time it's the humans who are doing it. I saw this unusually colored goose on the duck pond at the waterfront last Sunday. Birders have recently spotted an Aleutian goose in Antioch, a harlequin duck in Point Richmond, and a pair of roadrunners in Brentwood, so I was primed for an unusual discovery. Then I lifted my binoculars and learned it was an ingeniously made decoy.