Birding Western Mass: Mockingbirds

Thoughts on Birding from the Quabbin to the Berkshires

Study Up

We are between the waves of sandpipers. They are gone to the north for now — most of them, at least, although a few stay here, such as the killdeer and the spotted sandpiper, as well as birds that may not feel sandpipery enough to count, including the woodcock and the snipe — but when the weather turns on the tundra they will be back, in July.

If you want to be ready for their return, you could pore over the size charts, the field mark comparatives, the various ways to tell them apart. I could. But mostly these days I am gardening. The catbird likes my compost; the pine warbler is starting to bounce around the city blocks a little bit (can it be successful in this neighborhood?); when I napped yesterday afternoon in the long chair in the backyard I looked up and saw a red-breasted nuthatch feeding its offspring in the old oak’s rugged bark.

Napping is gardening. Don’t agree? Fight me.

Overflight

Mockingbirds are raising their offspring; they’re singing (but a little less); they turn up out of place, racing along the ground and flaring their white spots at their prey to disconcert them (or for some other reason we don’t know yet) and snatch them up.

The marquee communication a mockingbird delivers is a series of repeated phrases, seemingly random, that duplicate a song or sound. It’s common to hear one present the calls of the neighborhood where you hear them. And it’s common to get fooled by that. Getting juked by a mockingbird means that you’re good enough to know the call you’re hearing but not (at least immediately) to hear the nuances that tell you that a mockingbird ripped it off a different singer. 

(Don’t feel bad, BTW: Even the AI app Merlin’s song sussing feature gets fooled by mockingbirds sometimes.) 

In the South, where I grew up, mockingbirds are common as cardinals and because they’re more prominent you can almost mark distance with their voices as signposts. I was in Central Florida last fall and they were so abundant at the hotel where I stayed that I could stand in one place and hear three at the same time. I marked down what I believed I heard them mimic: Tree swallow, titmouse, cardinal, robin, killdeer. 

Like a DJ scratching a sample -- and now I have dated myself, as well as Spinderella and Terminator X -- the male mockingbird excerpts the songs it knows from its parent then mixes in a few more that it learns from its surroundings. Its childhood basically defines what it knows how to say and then in its adulthood it might pick up a few scraps of its own choosing. 

Hearing a mockingbird, then, is a core sample of the bird’s patrilineal ancestry. A thread or two may drop in a generation but most of the sounds of the place are carried on into a new pleat with the next bird in the lineage. 

Birds have accents. Especially, birds that don’t migrate, and so don’t mingle with large numbers of similar birds, have distinctive accents. For example, song sparrows and cardinals sound profoundly different just a few hundred miles apart. Mockingbirds also don’t migrate, so they soak in the vernacular of where their family dwells for generations. 

Mockingbirds ornament their voices and they bequeath those decorations through song. 

When the juvenile delivers the song it learns from its father it is waving its clan banner with a sprinkling of its own “ideas” that it has derived from its brief lived experience. When the clan banner carries many foreign patterns it catches the attention of females and may even cow less bold males. It means: My people are from somewhere else. We have good genes. We are fearless birds. 

When we humans listen, we can hear even more. A mockingbird’s song may document many generations of the place where we are standing and maybe even places farther away from which these mockingbirds and their families have shifted. A mockingbird, which selects its phrases in unpredictable sequences all day and sometimes much of the night, is presenting us with a soundtrack for a habitat.

In the mockingbird’s shuffled playlist are the birds of the present and the past, their accents and rhythms preserved in a manifested ancestral memory. When I was at my parents’ home in Richmond a few weeks ago I heard a killdeer and looked up, puzzled, from their city lawn — only to realize later that it had been a mockingbird showing its cosmopolitan ancestry.  

Half of mockingbirds’ songs are mimicry; the rest are their own, sometimes used more discursively and other times as part of their 200+ phrases that they assemble into long solos that they deliver from the corners of roof peaks, street signs, and treetops.

Much of my speech is unique to me -- my friends and associates know all too well the relish I take in showy speech -- but the better you know me the more you will hear my ancestry. If I tell you something is “nigh onto” something else as a way of saying it is nearby, a mark of my Virginian roots that derives from our English history, you will know that I feel we are close -- even closer than if you have heard me say “sho ‘nuff.” 

The mockingbird is different. It is using the song mementos of its family life as a way to demonstrate its value, turning the history of its ancestry inside out as an act of aggression and self-definition. But to imagine that in its world it is only thinking “I will show potential mates that I am worthy with my song,” I think, diminishes the beauty of its work. 

While the question of consciousness in a bird that weighs about as much as a kazoo is best reserved for a bigger barrel of ink, I’d rather think of the mockingbird as a kind of personified music of the air its family has traversed. Surely the male at least hears himself as defined in the scintillating intellect of his chosen verses, the potential of the next sample he’ll deliver, the tone he’ll choose for it and the segue that will follow. He likely has no sense of self but only of the concert that he dutifully and uproariously fills the summer day with. 

It’s our limiting this music to only part of the world that lets them juke us. I’ve searched out an unfamiliar song many times I’ve birded somewhere new only to discover a mockingbird delivering it. I see in my notes from the past that I’ve heard them do seagulls, vireos, phoebes, and frogs. They also duplicate the sounds of cell phones and trucks reversing. 

The most vexing one I remember was in Mississippi. My parents lived near a playground. I could hear the children on the equipment in the daytime. One night, I heard them long after they should have been in bed. I padded out of the screened porch to see what I could about this child who was doing what it shouldn’t. As I approached the swing set, which I could clearly hear squeaking as it did most of the day when kids were on it, I saw the swing was still and no rider sat in it. No child was present. An eerie feeling came over me. Was it a ghost? Did a child’s spirit swing on the motionless seat that dangled from a rusted chain in the stark streetlamp that hung above it? 

Then the swing sound changed to a cardinal. And then to a wren. 

I was being juked by a mockingbird. 

But in a way the song was not only a bird’s heartsong but also was a ghost. The bird’s songs might have been recent mimicry, but they were more likely its father’s recollections of its own father’s memories. Like the stories we pass down as material representations of the world, the mockingbirds did the same, but instead of doing it as a vehicle for meaning they were presenting it as a lineage of art. The sound of the swing was as much in the definition of that place as the song of a generations-past cardinal or the wren that darted through the camellias daily.   

For a little while, on a dark and empty playground, I listened to the immemorial past. 

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Focus

We are in the season of putting out dishes of water.

Had Maslow been a birder, he might have said that the pyramid for a bird would have been water and food topped by shelter.

In our yard, we have three baths. There’s one in the moth garden, which is woodsy. There’s one in the lawn — it’s the middle of a spiral of stones that seem like a worse idea every year as they sink another half inch into the dirt — and there’s one in the cottage garden, set down among the evening primroses and the daylily that threatens to survive every vicissitude we offer it.

We may go a week without rain in this pre-apocalyptic landscape. The more water there is with the more choices to get to it, the more opportunities you will have to intersect with the mysteries of summer bird life. Song is diminishing with less need for it and fewer migrants.

We feed birds through the summer, too. (We are sufficiently urban such that there are no bears here yet, but they are city blocks away, and that could change any July.) Water brings me the most pleasure and also the greatest variety of visitors. All birds need water for washing and drinking, whereas suet and seed bring only the birds who need those things.

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Bird Books and Whistles

Months ago, I read The Homing Instinct. Bernd Heinrich has license other authors do not. He can muse on personal things like his experience of a jungle or a tundra with idiosyncratic and highly personal perspectives to a degree that someone with less prominence is less likely to. I started with him on One Man’s Owl in another life, when I lived in Nebraska and was completely focused, for a while, in looking for owls. (I saw some; I heard more.) Where another author might turn their focus entirely to others, Heinrich’s long career gives him license to put more of himself in work that also muses on cross-species insights that can fascinate. I skipped some of this book. I’m old and I don’t have to read what I’m not interested in. But I highlighted extensively on passages that reveal consilient strategies among butterflies and birds. Heinrich has unique insights that make him always worth reading.

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