and subtropical regions, the mockingbird may be least responsive to, most
indifferent to, us upright mammals.
For example: male cardinals, especially unmated yearlings, sing out their
locations, challenges, and yearnings, the call ending with two or three
monotonal whistles. They hardly ever fail to respond to a human mocker
whose ending whistles exceed the cardinal’s most recent call by one. The
cardinal will go one more, and so on. I have played this game with those
scarlet birds (who are no dumber than I) up to thirteen or so before con-
ceding defeat. More charming, though, is the responsive white-throated
sparrow, which summers in Canada, migrating back and forth from far
south. It is a tiny creature, six inches long, and elusive, preferring thick
brushy places and forests, and I have seldom seen one. But its call is sub-
limely sad, reedy and dulcet, by far exceeding my own attempts at admir-
ing duplication. Yet the white-throats generously correct my pathetic imi-
tation of their haunting message: ‘‘Sweet sweet, Canada Canada Canada,’’
they sing; or, as a Canadian ornithologist once translated: ‘‘O-oh my! Can-
a-da, can-a-da, can-a-da.’’ The latter version is what I think I hear, and how
enchanting it is to know the sparrow communicates withme—not another
avian.
Never so with the mockingbird, whose hyperkinetic days are engrossed
with itself and its own kind. Its imitations of others mock, I must think,
rather than flatter (as imitation reputedly does, sincerely). The generaliza-
tion was demonstrated to me yet again as I was considering a title and com-
posing this preface. While sitting on my balcony one fine fall afternoon,
I watched a mockingbird alight upon the railing hardly five feet from my
Panama-hatted, newspaper-reading self. Stepping in place and stretching,
looking about, it took no notice of my large presence so close by. So I tried
to gain its attention with little whistles, my version of mockingbirds’ whis-
pering, then shriller calls. No response at all. Except that shortly the bird
deposited one fecal pellet upon my railing, then flew away. Still—however
annoying, sometimes maddening, and occasionally endearing—mocking-
birds remind us that we of the large brains are not alone the dominators of
earth’s attention, nor the centers of all universes, either. This seems infor-
mation most useful when thinking about ecological, or environmental, his-
tory. Mockingbirds live mostly among and near human-built landscapes,
relishing the creator’s and our own fruity bounty and surviving (somehow)
our chemical dependencies. Yet if one thing about them is utterly under-
standable, it is that mockingbirds are notourcreatures but singers of them-
selves. Their cacophony seems to me useful as metaphor, both for human
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