low eyes. Males and females are similar in appearance and prefer urban,
suburban, and scrub habitats, where they eat insects and fruit. Mocking-
birds are small, too, adults usually measuring hardly ten inches from beak
to tail-tip, and they are slimmer than robins. Nonetheless they are aggres-
sive; the males are particularly bellicose at challenging rivals for mates,
and males and females alike ferociously defend feeding territory. In pairs
and bands of four or more, mockingbirds have long been observed mob-
bing intruders, including other avians, snakes, cats, dogs, and humans.
J. J. Audubon famously painted mockingbirds furiously defending a nest
against rattlesnakes. That rattlesnakes do not climb troubled Audubon not
at all, for he was a showman as well as a naturalist and painter. The non-
viper rat snake, skillful climber and devourer of birds as well as rodents,
would have been the truer subject, albeit less dramatic.
It is the mockingbird’s voice—or better, voices—that makes it some-
thing much more than ‘‘gray,’’ something far more colorful, and more inter-
esting, than squawking parakeets.Mimus polyglottos, the bird’s perfect taxo-
nomic designation, mimics other birds—thus the common name given by
the eighteenth-century naturalist Mark Catesby. Mockingbirds will mock
parakeets’ squawks but also warblers’ warbles, kingfishers’ rattles, and the
sounds of at least three dozen other birds. Some ornithologists and bird-
watchers declare that mockerscomposesongs as well as imitate others,
and that they never cease learning new expressions. An old mockingbird
always has the largest repertoire. Mockingbirds can sing low, whisper-
ingly, and raucously loud. They also perform what should be called sound
effects rather than song—for example, dogs barking, chickens cackling,
frogs croaking, and wheelbarrows’ wheels groaning. Males, particularly un-
attached ones during the spring, sing day and night. All will emote on
perches, from nests, in flight, endlessly. To human auditors, this can be
charming or annoying.
In Harper Lee’s belovedTo Kill a Mockingbird(), kindly elders advise
sweet children that it would be sinful to rub out such a creature. Why? Be-
cause mockingbirds expend their remarkable, perhaps exhausting talents
forourpleasure. I think not. First, mockingbirds—especially males in the
spring, particularly at night—are not pleasurable at all, but rather the oppo-
site. But even when they are a delight to hear—paired, in the fall, happily
gathering food, or tuneful and/or in the whispering mode—our pleasure
makes no difference to them. (Lee’s elders were raising yet more homocen-
tric naturalists.) While neither an ornithologist nor a consistent, learned
birder, I do observe that of all the songbirds in this continent’s temperate
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