We come to him at last, the great singer of our continent.
This celebrated and very extraordinary bird, in extent and variety of vocal powers, stands unrivalled by the whole feathered songsters of this or perhaps any other country; and shall receive from us, in this place, all that attention and respect which superior merit is justly entitled to.
– Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, 1828
It’s been a long build-up. I’ve been cataloging the particular excellencies of our various songbirds: towhees and wrens, greenbacks and doves—each has its superlative quality and unique talent. But mockingbirds possess all talents. The persistence of towhees, the exuberant virtuosity of wrens and goldfinches, and the long-burning fervor of mourning doves—all are mustered on parade by the king of song.
The trivia that make up the mockingbird’s non-musical life can be quickly summarized. They are a familiar sight in most neighborhoods: gray, jay-sized birds who patrol lawns for insects and forage in shrubs for berries. Their plumage appears nondescript, except when they fly or perform courtship dances that reveal the white patches in their wings and outer tail feathers.
Mockingbirds are found across the country and extend well beyond our borders into South America. In California, they are non-migratory; both pairs and bachelor males maintain year-round territories. Mockingbirds are historically native to southern California desert and chaparral regions, but their range has expanded northwards over the last hundred years in lockstep with expanding human habitation, which creates their ideal assemblage of open areas, fruiting trees and shrubs, and scattered podiums to sing from. Most of our Bay Area wildlands are not particularly congenial to them: the best advice for observing mockingbirds is usually to go for a walk in the neighborhood.
And that’s about all you need to know about Beethoven’s preferred breakfast and commute habits. Because there really is only one overriding topic here, whether considered for its indelible impression upon human listeners or for its prominence in their own life history: those unending songs of countless voices.
Our own music, varied, powerful, and free
No American birdsong has been more praised. Routine examples are too numerous to catalog. But one trend across the first century and more of our country’s ornithological literature is particularly prominent: an almost ubiquitous evocation of national pride. Everyone seems compelled to compare mockingbirds with their old world rivals. Here’s Audubon, one representative sample out of dozens:
The mellowness of the song, the varied modulations and gradations, the extent of its compass, the great brilliancy of execution, are unrivalled. There is probably no bird in the world that possesses all the musical qualifications of this king of song.
The musical powers of this bird have often been taken notice of by European naturalists… Some of these persons have described the notes of the Nightingale as occasionally fully equal to those of our bird, but to compare her essays to the finished talent of the Mocking-bird, is, in my opinion, quite absurd.
– Audubon, The Birds of America, 1840
Or, as Dylan scornfully drawled to a skeptical English audience in 1966, “this is American music.” Keep your folk songs and nightingales, your stuffy proprieties and dead traditions—we have our own music now.
To keep us firmly on the side of justifiable pride and avoid merely ignorant flag-waving, I should review the basics of the song I’m praising. Mockingbird song is made up of long series of repeated phrases, which may be musical ideas of their own invention, imitations of other birds, or imitations of human-originating sounds. They will typically repeat a given motif several times, then another, and another, and so on ad infinitum, sometimes singing for over an hour at a stretch.
The most unique and frequently praised aspect of this song is obviously its imitative extravagance, which seem to be nearly unlimited by any question of technical feasibility. Mockingbirds will mock anything. In wild settings, the calls of other birds are dominant motifs. From the era of frequent caging, there are numerous examples of birds who would base their repertoire around household sounds and snippets of popular melodies. Nowadays, our suburban mockers compose medleys of neighborhood birds, car alarms, and cell phones.
Everything is reproduced with seemingly perfect fidelity. And this “everything” encompasses a lot: an individual mockingbird might utter over 300 unique phrases in the course of a season, though functionally speaking repertoires are usually pinned in the 100–200 range, since the 300+ counts include a lot of slight variants or sounds that were only heard once. Sinsonte, they call them in much of Central America, from an ancient Náhuatl name meaning four-hundred-voices. That isn’t far off.
When you also take into account the ubiquity (given their intense overlap with human habitation), frequency (they sing nearly year-round in the south, and for a good seven months or so here), obviousness (especially when singing at night, when other birds go quiet), and sheer overpowering volume that accompany the virtuosic technical ability of this song, it is no surprise that its author was eagerly embraced as a figurehead by our ornithological patriots.
The height of the mockingbird’s symbolic championing is Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” In the poem, the bird’s song is held up as an embodiment of the unfulfilled yearning that forms the basis for the poetic vocation. But the mockingbird is also offered as a subject of national pride, as the symbol for Whitman’s larger project of founding a new American poetry. When first published, the poem was stridently criticized in a Cincinnati paper. Whitman responded in print from a rhetorical third person, embracing the persona of the mockingbird and brashly proclaiming himself the voice of the American spirit:
Commit not yourself, too irretrievably, that there is nothing… in the Mocking-Bird’s chants. But pursue them awhile—listen—yield yourself—persevere…
We listen with accumulated eagerness for those mouths that can make the vaults of America ring here today—those who will not only touch our case, but embody it and all that belongs to it—sing it with varied and powerful idioms, and in the modern spirit, at least as capable, as loud and proud as the best spirit that has ever preceded us.
Our own song, free, joyous, and masterful. Our own music, raised on the soil, carrying with it all the subtle analogies of our own associations—broad with the broad continental scale of the New World and full of the varied products of its varied soils—composite—comprehensively Religious—Democratic—the red life-blood of Love, warming, running through every line, every word. Ah, if this Walt Whitman, as he keeps on, should ever succeed in presenting such music, such a poem, an identity, emblematic, in the regions of creative art, of the wondrous all-America, material and moral, he would indeed do something.
And if he don’t, the Mocking-Bird may at least have the satisfaction of dying in a good cause. But then again he looks so little like dying, anyhow.
– “All about a Mocking-Bird,” New York Saturday Press, 7 January 1860
The positive self-image of America has been under some strain recently. A proud faith in our joyous and loving national character does not seem to be the mood of the moment. But the news has always been dominated by dissatisfaction. Conflict and fear, distrust and poisonous rhetoric—none of these are phenomena unique to our historical moment. None of these would be any surprise to Whitman, who lived in times of slavery, who gathered bodies from the battlefields of civil war, who was compelled to hide his closest relationships from society’s condemnation.
That was the land and society he lived in. The blatant injustices and violence surrounding him make our disputes seem like mild, belated squabbles. But what did Whitman think of when he thought of his country? He thought of the boldness of youth, thought our proper poetry was “a song free and joyous.” How did Whitman reply when he was attacked in the press for both his craft and his person? With a declaration that he would chant verses with “the red life-blood of Love running through every line.” And what name stood for this brave new poet? The mockingbird.
The time is always right for a declaration of faith, if your faith is strong enough. When those around you are shouting of their differences, when your song is either belittled or ignored, then call our mockingbird to mind. He is uninterested in complaining, shrugs off persecution, considers nation-splitting war a passing thing. Listen and you can hear this in that endless flow of unhesitating rhymes, that unerring chant that takes in all the varied voices of this new world and weaves them in a song.
Should we be silent, chastened by shame and doubt and fear? The mockingbird sings his broad and continental song, that song of those not dying, but just beginning to be born.
Somewhere listening must be the one I want
That’s not a bad starting point: admiration, pride, and wonder at the mockingbird’s boundless and overflowing musicality. But in the end, the deepest richness will be found not in what past persons have heard in the mockingbird’s song, but in what it means to the singers themselves.
Fortunately, the two are not utterly divergent. It would be wrong to conclude that the millenia-long history of birdsong encomia is a complete edifice of falsehood, with zero relationship to reality. Those writers note the enthusiastic, musical exuberance—which is true—and often tie it to the courtship activity of spring—which is also true.
The trick has always been to tease out the finer-grained reality, to separate our instinctive and customary human interpretations of such relationships from the way a specific bird species actually conducts the crucial relationships of its life. An accurate interpretation will reflect the unique habits of its subject and not merely state of all birds that they are singing “in rapturous devotion” or the like, which fails to acknowledge the substantial differences among birds.
I’ve tried to give a number of these stories of song, from the simple territorial insistence of the red-eyed towhee, to the ornate competitions of the wrens and goldfinches, and to the ongoing synchronized devotion of mourning doves. Mockingbird song is particularly unforgettable because they wield their music for all of these functions: territoriality, courtship, and bond maintenance. The overall result is a song that is remarkable for its indefatigable performance, its musical complexity, and its season-long continuance.
Other birds are amateurs and dilettantes in their music. Mockingbirds have a calling and cannot stay silent.
Territorial night-singing favors volume over variety
A first clue to the primary evolutionary function of a song: is it complex and variable, or simple and stereotyped? Elaborate songs like those of the goldfinches form a good basis for comparison between males: we assume that the complexity developed to make the song more useful for female assessment. Simple songs like the nearly identical trills practiced by the red-eyed towhees are less informative about the singer’s fitness and seem to be given primarily by unpaired males to indicate their territory to other males. Do mockingbirds fit within this outline?
In short, yes—on both sides. Mockingbirds have famously complex songs that clearly developed in response to female choosiness, and they sing their most complex and varied songs when courting a specific female. But they are also extremely territorial, and practice what is almost a whole different song for that other function of warning off rival males. These territorial songs are much less varied—by mockingbird standards—and possess another unique quality suggestive of this different purpose: they continue into the night.
This is probably the second most remarked-upon trait of mockingbird song, after the extraordinary imitative exuberance. Essentially none of our other birds sing at night. This is because the middle of the night is not when the females are conducting their mate evaluations. They are, sensibly, sleeping.
By the standards of any other bird, these would still be remarkable songs. The basic pattern is the same, but the diversity and imitative content is greatly reduced: one study noted that if the authors were to have estimated their subject mockingbird’s repertoire based on his night songs, they would have produced an estimate of 82 song types, but if based on his daytime courtship songs they would have calculated a total of 209. 1
At night, mockingbirds hold back their energy from creative inventiveness and feats of memory, instead throwing everything they have into volume and vigor. They play to their audience, and this is not an audience that respects nuance. This is an audience that respects force, power, and presence. These blunt songs of low diversity and high intensity exist to tell neighboring males that there is an unsleeping defender, tireless and alert.
Females receive the lengthy epistles adorned with diverse and striking poetic quotations. Males get the war chant, repetitive but unrelenting.
Night song might have a “mere” hundred or so unique phrases.
The virtuosity of classic courtship
It’s those unendingly varied love letters of their courtship songs that get the most attention, that form the basis for most of the 19th century gushing mentioned above. These songs are analogous to the elaborate singing of goldfinches and the like: the more complex a song is, the more strongly it indicates an individual’s mental and physical health, suggesting that he is a well-nourished and capable forager, of solid genetic stock, and therefore a good mate. This signalling is accurate: birds with the most complex songs successfully raise more young than birds with less impressive repertoires.
Mockingbird song is usually partnered with physical displays that showcase health in other ways. A good chunk of their singing is directly accompanied by a sort of dance, a series of skyward leaps that show off their white wing patches. Mock chases of the courted female and constant chases of intruders demonstrate speed and agility. Mockingbirds also have the charming habit of giving tours of their territory to newly-arrived females, with special attention to prospective nest sites. As with many wrens, males will follow up these tours with actual construction, often framing two or three nests for female approval and subsequent lining with softer materials.
These are all expressions of courtship, exertions made by a male when a female has appeared on his territory (securing of which is the preliminary requirement to even present his suit). This is the time when we record those maximal feats of song, those repertoires of hundreds of distinct phrases. Passive plumage displays are a minimal element here; effort and intelligence are the traits in demand. A rich territory gets you in the door, athleticism never hurts, nest-building shows diligence. But there is no greater proof of excellence than those many-voiced songs, the appeal of the musician and actor combined in one being.
Go to a concert; go to the movies. Ask the watching men their thoughts as they see the womens’ eyes look forward, not at them. How could they compete with those on stage and screen?
Sing a song for weeks, for her ears alone. Play a hundred parts, with unending novel voices. And when your melodies trail off and your repertoire runs short, then you will know the difference between the kings of song and mere pretenders.
The courtship does not end: song as bond reinforcement
Mockingbirds thus perform territorial bachelor songs with unmatched persistence. And they perform elaborate courtship songs with unmatched variety. But mockingbirds are also monogamous birds with long-term, multi-year bonds. What then explains the continuing flow of abundant song from the many established pairs? After all that courtship work, can’t they close the book upon “happily ever after” and relax from those exhausting youthful exploits? Not quite.
The continuation of song is, in part, an act of mate synchronization. Mockingbirds, like doves, have been shown to use song as a way of staying in practical alignment, with male song sparking hormonal activities in the female that lead to the next renesting.2 The continued use of song throughout the summer can thus be seen as a natural complement to a long, multi-brood nesting season (three nesting cycles in three months is commonly achievable, or sometimes as many as six in six in Florida). He begins to sing; she prepares to lay eggs. Birds have no instruction manual or printed calendar—they respond biologically to the behavior of their mate.
But the resumption of song can also be legitimately seen as an act of resumed courtship, as a way of asserting primacy over not-fully-vanquished rivals. Song ceases during incubation and nestling-feeding: this is the time for secrecy from predators, as well as the period when female fidelity can be relied upon (newly-launched adultery is exceedingly rare among pregnant and nursing mothers). But then the young fledge, they hop around the bushes for four or five days, and singing resumes as the male starts work on a new nest. That’s the dangerous moment for the insecure husband: there are known cases of mockingbird “sequential polyandry,” where the female mates with an available neighbor once her fledged young are old enough to be cared for by their father alone. 3 And so that is when he works and sings, in order that she won’t forget all his good qualities.
What’s going on, in short, is ongoing female assessment. Female choice is not limited to the initial courtship period, is not confined to a brief window in which her decision is made and her fate is set. Mockingbirds favor long-term monogamy, but they do so with the ever-present possibilities of both adultery (“extra-pair copulations,” in clumsy but less-loaded scientific parlance) and divorce (the accepted scientific term). Past compatibility does not assure permanent compatibility. There are no marriage conventions that can stand against the fundamental force of female choice: if she wants to leave, that’s how it’s going to be.
Mockingbird courtship can be unusually extended, not uncommonly comprising several weeks in which the female weighs her choices, evaluating not just instantaneously observable fitness but the persistence of male attentiveness. She evaluates over time. But what is more notable is the splitting up of even well-established pairs. She might have nested with him in the past, perhaps even with repeated success, but if the nests begin to fail—suggestive of his inadequacy as provisioner, defender, or genetic contributor—or someone better moves in next door, she will leave. 4
That is what drives the male mockingbird’s ongoing fervor to impress. And it’s not just impressive but functionally useless singing, which could be put down to mere synchronizing of the biological watches. The overall distribution of the conjugal workload indicates a biological tilt toward female advantage: male parental investment is higher than that of females and distinctly higher than the average among male songbirds. 5 They have to work.
Males perform the majority of nest construction, a substantial task given the five or so nests they will often build each season (a new one for each clutch, plus extras for conspicuous multi-domicility). Males undertake most of the dangerous defensive duties, an activity in which they are famously aggressive, whether facing off with other mockers, potential predators, or even such outsized intruders as nest-disrupting humans. Very few 2 oz. songbirds want to pick a fight with us. But the reality is that female mockingbirds prefer aggressive males, so the dragons must be faced. Most unusually, males take on the majority of the child-feeding, essentially taking over all responsibility for the latter two of the three weeks in which the fledglings are dependent.
Basically no other American songbirds do that. The typical male songbird takes a lesser or equal share in nest-building and child-feeding, wraps up a brood or two, and then moves on with his own life until next year’s courtship—back to carefree bachelorhood. A minority of species pair up and stick together till death do them part. But very few birds are so strongly faced with that stern taskmaster of Ongoing Female Assessment. And so it is that very few birds sing like this one.
He met her before his first birthday. He lived for six years more and kept her always by his side. There were always rivals waiting in the wings, pressing on his borders: he chased them away. But there were always others further off, somewhere beyond and out of reach. He fought and danced, fed her children, and built nest after nest, so that she would have no cause to leave.
But the key ritual of a six-year mocker marriage? That he sang to her in March, in June, and in August just the same. Each time he sang, he added new instruments to the orchestra inside of him, rejected stasis and old age. And so as summer wanes and birds grow quiet, as one by one the sunrise voices fade, you will still hear song’s sovereign, crown intact and head unbowed. He lifts his song again for that one who listens still.
Conclusion: A thousand songs start to life within me
Whitman watched a mockingbird, suddenly bereft of his mate, sing on and on through the night. What did he hear the bird say?
Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.
O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.
O throat! O trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth,
Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.
– “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
The poem tells a story of a pair of birds, closely bound and happily singing. Whitman is precise and accurate in his details: the migration route, the description of the eggs, the repetitive imitation of mockingbird syntax. And this dramatic crux of the poem is also true to nature: when the female disappears, the male erupts in singing. 6 The bird who remains is stricken by an overwhelming sense of solitude.
A song of sadness when she is lost. But also, when they were together, a song of joy. This reflects the perpetual source of human confusion about birdsong, the endless debate as our species tries to make simplistic categories for the language of other beings: are singing birds happy or sad? The answer is both. Sometimes we can deduce that a bird inclines more to one state or the other based on when and how he sings. Mockingbirds sing in all scenarios: initial solitary bachelorhood, the excitement of new courtship, at the height of established domesticity, and in the greater loneliness of the sudden widower. “Happy” and “sad” are crude and inaccurate labels, but they are correct in their instinctive assumption that there must be some compelling emotion at work.
We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird.
– “Beauty,” Emerson
It is easy to make errors when rendering birdsong into human terms. But we are also prone to an inverse error when we completely deny the applicability of our language of emotion. A widowed, night-singing mockingbird is not fulfilling a function in mere robotic automatism. You don’t sing the blues through long sleepless nights because it feels like the simple, easy course. You don’t become the king of song through blithe freedom from cares. To exclude all sympathy from our interpretation would be an intellectual mistake, would undoubtedly omit a crucial part of the story.
Science rightfully corrects our misunderstandings. The night bird is not joyously enraptured with his mate, to cite a common 19th century error. But what remains is still something we can understand.
He call’d on his mate,
He pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know…
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.
O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me…
Whitman described his task as “translating… the song of his dusky demon and brother.” That is what I try to do, and what anyone listening closely to birds should attempt. Keep those sibling-songs with you and chant them again. Render them into words you can understand, knowing that translation requires honesty, but also imagination, a dash of invention to bridge the gap between two languages of imperfect alignment.
Why can’t he sleep, the dusky demon in the moonlight? Why does he strut and parade his four hundred shining words? And why does he keep singing, though he’s lived with her a lifetime? Because he’s haunted by a hunger that never goes away. Because there are no words that quench forever the universal longing to be found.
Header photo by Rick from Alabama.
- Derrickson 1986, "Yearly and Situational Changes in the Estimate of Repertoire Size in Northern Mockingbirds"
- Logan, Hyatt, and Gregorcyk 1990, "Song playback initiates nest building during clutch overlap in mockingbirds, Mimus polyglottos"
- Logan 1991, "Mate switching and mate choice in female Northern Mockingbirds: facultative monogamy"
- Logan 1997, "Mate-reassessment in an Already-mated Female Northern Mockingbird" and ibid.
- Zaias & Breitwisch 1989, "Intra-pair Cooperation, Fledgling Care and Renesting by Northern Mockingbirds;" Breitwisch, Merritt, and Whitesides 1986, "Parental Investment by the Northern Mockingbird: Male and Female Roles in Feeding Nestlings"
- "Comparison of mean song output in the last two samples before removal with the first two samples after removal indicated a rapid threefold increase in singing," Logan and Hyatt 1991, "Mate Attraction by Autumnal Song in the Northern Mockingbird"
I absolutely love your informative, clever, and warm style of writing!
Thank you Ellen!
Absolutely remarkable. Beautiful photos & audio-video clips, too – thank you again, Jack!
P.S. – the concept of Ongoing Female Assessment was a revelation, exponentially enhancing my appreciation for those hard-working males – wow!
Thanks Chris!
Why are there Mockingbirds in Novato, but not in Point Reyes Station, where I’ve lived for over 40 years?
From looking on eBird, it looks like mockingbirds are not totally absent from Point Reyes Station. But as described in the main article, mockingbirds actually prefer suburbanized habitats over most natural areas in northern California. They love irrigated lawns, berry-bearing ornamentals, intermittent trees for nesting, and intermittent houses to perch and sing on. I guess Point Reyes has too much natural beauty and not enough humans! I think you get plenty of compensating birds that we don’t see here though.