Nesting mockingbirds are not major news in most of the United States. Northern mockingbirds–to give them their full, official title–are not only common, they are conspicuous. South of the Ohio River, practically every backyard has its nesting mockers, and the birds sing for much of the year. During nesting season, they may sing all night.
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Mark Catesby was another pioneer in the days when men could call themselves natural historians and collect and classify everything from dragonflies to rhododendrons, without worrying about specialization. He incorporated some of Lawson’s observations into his own Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, published in a series of volumes between 1729 and 1747. Catesby’s color engraving and his written description of “the Mockbird of Carolina” served as Linnaeus’s source for classifying the bird and naming it Mimus polyglottos, the many-tongued mimic. Catesby noted that the Indians called it cencontlatolly, which he translated as “four-hundred tongues.” Mockingbirds were apparently as common around Indian towns as they are now around the towns of the Indians’ conquerors.
Their talent for mimicry is amazing. They regularly imitate the songs and calls of dozens of different birds. A single mockingbird was once heard to mimic 32 other species in the space of ten minutes. And they don’t stop with other birds. Frogs, crickets, squeaky wheelbarrows, even pianos can be part of the repertoire. These imitations are not half-assed efforts. Even electronic analysis cannot separate them from the originals.
Catbirds and brown thrashers are very good singers and accomplished mimics, although they don’t do quite as much imitation as mockingbirds. The length and variety of their songs are features that set all these mimic thrushes apart from other families of songbirds. Wood thrushes and veeries, for example, sing songs of ethereal beauty, but they essentially repeat the same brief phrase over and over, and each performance lasts no more than a couple of seconds.
Some of the thrashers are quite local in their distribution, none more than the aptly named California thrasher, a bird that lives mainly in the chaparral hills, the scrubby landscape that keeps threatening to burn LA. California thrashers live only in the Californias, baja and alto. In Life Histories of North American Birds, A.C. Bent describes their range as extending from “the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the higher mountains of southern California to the Pacific, and from the head of the Sacramento Valley to about latitude 30 degrees in Baja California.” Deserts and high mountains are the obstacles likely to have prevented the California thrasher from expanding eastward.
