Birds
Northern Mockingbird
Mimus polyglottos · also called mockingbird, mocker
The northern mockingbird is a study in contrasts: a drab grey bird with one of the most dazzling voices in North America, and a small songbird that will unhesitatingly attack a hawk, a cat, or your head. It sings other birds’ songs, and machines’, all night if it has to.
Overview
Mimus polyglottos lives across the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean, in open country with scattered shrubs — farmland, desert edges, and especially suburbs. It is slim and grey with white wing patches and a long tail, and it eats insects in summer and fruit in winter.
The borrowed songbook
Its name means “many-tongued mimic.” A male learns 50–200 song types across its life and keeps adding, copying other birds, frogs, dogs, gates, and car alarms, and repeating each phrase several times. Unmated males sing at night, often under streetlights — the bird Americans mistake for a nightingale.
Fearless
Both parents dive-bomb cats, dogs, hawks, and people near the nest, and a 2009 study showed they learn to recognise specific humans who have threatened it before.
A cultural bird
It is the state bird of five states and the title creature of Harper Lee’s novel, where killing one is called a sin because it “just sings.” Trapped nearly out of the east in the 1800s for the cage trade, it recovered fully once the trade was banned.
Status
Least Concern and common, though some regional surveys show a slow long-term decline.
Northern Mockingbird: common questions
How many songs can a mockingbird really learn?
A lot, and it keeps learning for life. Studies of male northern mockingbirds have documented individual repertoires ranging from around 50 song types in younger birds to 150 or 200 in older ones, with birds adding new material each breeding season. Much of the repertoire is imitation — recognisable copies of the songs and calls of other local birds, and often non-bird sounds such as frog calls, cricket trills, dog barks, gate hinges, and car alarms, reproduced accurately enough that the original species will sometimes respond. The mockingbird strings these together in long sequences, giving each phrase three to six times before switching, which is the pattern that distinguishes its singing from that of the birds it copies.
Why does a mockingbird keep attacking my cat or my head?
You or the cat are near its nest, and the mockingbird has decided you are a threat to be driven off. Both parents defend the nest aggressively, swooping from behind, striking with the feet, and calling harshly, and they will keep it up for as long as the eggs or chicks are present, usually a couple of weeks per brood and often several broods a season. Research has shown that mockingbirds can learn to tell individual people apart and will escalate their response to a person who has approached the nest before while ignoring strangers, so it can feel personal because, in a sense, it is. The behaviour stops once the young have fledged and moved off.
Is the bird in "To Kill a Mockingbird" this species?
Yes. Harper Lee set the novel in Alabama, and the northern mockingbird is the common mockingbird there. The book's title comes from Atticus Finch's advice that it is fine to shoot bluejays but a sin to kill a mockingbird, explained by a neighbour as being because mockingbirds do not damage crops or gardens, they just sing. The bird is used through the story as a symbol of innocence that does no harm and is destroyed anyway. The same species is also referenced by Walt Whitman and appears in the folk lullaby that promises to buy a hushed child a mockingbird.
What is the difference between a mockingbird and a catbird or thrasher?
They are all in the same family, the Mimidae, the mimic thrushes, and all are accomplished vocal imitators. The gray catbird is slate-grey with a black cap and a rusty patch under the tail, and it tends to sing a rambling, quieter jumble with a distinctive cat-like mew, and it usually does not repeat phrases. The brown thrasher is larger and rich reddish-brown with heavy streaking below, and it typically repeats each phrase exactly twice. The northern mockingbird is pale grey with white wing flashes, sings the loudest and most public song, and repeats each phrase several times.