Laura Erickson's For the Birds

When I was in the Rio Grande Valley earlier this month, I saw plenty of the Texas.state bird–the Mockingbird. Mockingbirds are one of the coolest birds on the planet, with the ability to imitate just about every sound in their environment, and to remember sounds years after hearing them. Just a small sampling of the sounds they can imitate includes cackling hens, chain saws, dogs barking, and notes on a piano. Most young males master at least 180 different imitations within a few months, and over an entire breeding cycle, a male is likely to produce 400 different song types. Most of the imitations are so dead-on that electronic analysis can often not detect differences between the mockingbird and the original sound source.

In his Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote a long, romantic poem about a Mockingbird he remembered from his boyhood. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” is a fascinating poetic attempt to capture both the rhythm and the meaning of a Long Island mockingbird’s all night song after the male lost his mate. One brief stanza of the poem goes:

0 throat! 0 throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.
0 past! 0 happy life! 0 songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more.

The actual poem goes on and on, just the way a mockingbird’s song does. Whitman inferred that the male singing all night must have lost his mate. And ornithologists now believe that the males who sing songs all night long are, indeed, alone, either after losing a mate or because they are young and never had a mate to begin with.

Native people treasured the mockingbird. One tribe of Algonquins called it Cencontlatolly, which means “400 tongues.” The Biloxi Indians believed it “mocked one’s words,” while the Choctaws called it the bird “that speaks a foreign tongue.” The Hopis believed the mockingbird gave the gift of language.

The mockingbird was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite bird–he kept a pet mockingbird named Dick with him when he worked in his study in the White House. He taught the bird to ride on his shoulder and take food from his lips, and when Jefferson went upstairs, his faithful avian companion always followed. If he was devoted to his little pet, he was passionate about the species. In a letter to Abigail Adams written while in Paris on June 21, 1785, he commented, “I heard there the Nightingale in all it’s perfection: and I do not hesitate to pronounce that in America it would be deemed a bird of the third rank only, our mockingbird, and fox­ coloured thrush being unquestionably superior to it.”

Jefferson was so devoted to the mockingbird that I’m a little surprised that Virginia isn’t one of the five states that made the mockingbird their state bird–they chose the cardinal. Texas, the state with the most recorded species in the nation, despite its wonderful Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, Green Jays, Roseate Spoonbills, Roadrunners, and other specialty birds, picked the mockingbird. And somehow that wasn’t a bad decision at all. As Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “The mockingbird ‘s invention is limitless. He strews newness about as casually as a god.”

http://www.bartle by.com/l 42/212.html

http://sites .unc.edu/adrian/birds/whitmanl /analysis.html