The Mockingbird

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for mockingbirds. You could say it was my "spark" bird---the one that started me on my lifelong love of birds. When I was a youngster, my parents gave me a little tape recorder and I used to sit on our back doorstep and record the mockingbird that perched in a cottonwood tree. It sang and sang and sang and the variety of its songs was remarkable. Who would think this plain looking grey bird could be so full of song.

Northern Mockingbirds – and about twenty percent of other passerine songbirds – are mimics. They steal their songs from their environments. Imagine the smartest student in class unnecessarily cheating on tests by going around the room and copying little bits of every other student’s answers.

That makes no sense. Instead of getting an “A” on the test, the student would get an “F” because her answers would be gibberish. Yet mockingbirds – obviously the star students in avian music class – do precisely that. Rather than develop their own unique songs, they just copy bits and pieces of the songs of other species.

Why? Wouldn’t it be easier and less costly to invent their own songs and pass those down to their offspring? Less brain power would be required and learning would be simpler. Besides, the mockingbird isn’t fooling any other birds. They all recognize that the mockingbird isn’t one of them.

Nobody knows. We think we know that they sing for the same reasons as other birds: the males are seeking, stimulating, and keeping mates and they are competing with one another for mates and territories. But no one knows why they evolved singing songs of other birds. The same question can be asked about other mimics such as Common Starlings, Marsh Warblers, Australian Lyrebirds, bowerbirds, scrubbirds, and African Robin-chats.

We’ve learned a lot about Mockingbird song in the last century though. We know, for instance, that both males and females sing, although females sing only in the summer and only when their mate is off their territory. The males sing most in Spring, less in summer, still less in Autumn and hardly at all in winter. Unmated males sing more than mated males and will, in spring, sing all night long. Unmated males sing in all directions, while mated males tend to sing inward toward their own territories.

The males possess two entirely different repertoires, one for the spring and another for autumn. One had 203 songs in his mind. Somewhere between 90 and 150 seems about average. They continue to learn new songs for as long as they live. Older birds have larger repertoires than younger ones. Males with the most varied songs may get the largest territories. They may also mate earlier. And they sing all the time during breeding season, warbling away while copulating, eating, and foraging.

Some years ago, I had the great pleasure of being able to rehabilitate a mockingbird. It had come into our local rescue clinic with a slight injury, but needed time to heal before being released. At a certain point I had moved her into a larger container with more room and I put various things in the container---branches, twigs, a mirror for companionship and other little objects. This mockingbird was not only a great mimic, but she apparently was also an interior designer. She moved all the objects around the container to her liking and whenever she looked in the mirror I truly had the feeling that she knew she was looking at herself.

She healed nicely and was released back into the wild. I like to think that she is still out in the world gracing us with her songs.