The musical Mockingbird is well known as a backyard bird with a vast vocabulary of songs and a variety of other sounds up to 200 in number to orally select from.
Each sound at the drop of a hat is usually repeated as many as six times during the day and even more during the night of mating season. Bird-watching experts believe that as the male expands the number of possibilities to choose from, he becomes a more attractive suitor to females looking for a mate.
What the experts don’t often know is that a Mockingbird’s imitations also include a large number of human-made sounds such as loud, human laughter, the ringing of a door bell or the sound of an alarm clock. Other mechanical sounds include a train whistle or the siren from a fire house. And in my illustration, it can often be the sound of a church tower with a catchy religious hymnal, “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
How can the bird possibly imitate every one of these different combinations that come through so realistically? The sounds that most animals make are way down in their throats near their lungs to produce a thick, throaty volume, but birds blow a vocal pitch though their windpipes, sounding more like the horn of a trumpet. Then their voices are funneled into the ear like the horn of a trumpet passing into the ear with a loud and clear tone that is easily identified.
A hundred years ago, people were allowed to trap and cage Mockingbirds to show off their entertaining vocal performance. They were taken out of nests at a young age and sold into influential homes in Philadelphia, St. Louis and New York. In 1928, they would fetch as much as $50. However, now you can attract them to perform in your bird-watching backyards by keeping the lawns open and edges planted with fruit trees, mulberry and black berries.
Now with the arrival of global warming and climate change, the Mockingbird’s total habitat has expanded into more northern, adjoining states, thus increasing the chances that you and your children will have something to tell about in school, just as you have learned as a reader of The Wanderer.
By George B. Emmons
