In the Haunts of the Mocking-Bird

THE mocking-bird has been called the American nightingale, with a view, no doubt, to inflicting a compliment involving the operation, known to us all, of damning with faint praise. The nightingale presumably is not the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds immemorial title to preëminence amongst singing birds. The story of Philomela, however, as first told, was not an especially pleasing one, and the poets made no great use of it. Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostrophe to the nightingale comparable to Sappho’s fragment To the Rose; still, the bird has a prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and upheld by the master romancers of the world. To compare the song of any other bird with that of the nightingale is like instituting a comparison between some poet of to-day and Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the would-be rival is concerned. The world has long ago made up its mind, and when the world once does that there is an end, a cul de sac, a stopping-place, of all argument of the question. Indeed, it is a very romantic distance that separates the bird from most of us. Chaucer’s groves and Shakespeare’s woods shake out from their leaves a fragrance that reaches us along with a song which is half the bird’s and half the poet’s. We connect the nightingale’s music with a dream of chivalry, troubadours, and mediæval castles. It is as dear to him who has heard it only in the changes rung by the Persian, French, and English bards as it is to him whose chamber window opens on a choice haunt of the bird in rural England. I might dare to go further and claim that I, who have never heard a nightingale sing, can say with truth that its music is, in a certain way, as familiar to me as the sound of a running stream or the sough of a spring breeze. I often find myself reluctantly shaking off something like a recollection of having somewhere, in some dim old grove, heard the voice that Keats imprisoned in his matchless ode. There is a sort of aerial perspective in the mere name of the nightingale ; it is like some of those classical allusions which bring into a modern essay suggestions with an infinite distance in them. So thoroughly has this been felt that it may safely be said that the nightingale has been more frequently mentioned by our American writers, good, bad, and indifferent, than any one of our native birds. No doubt it ought to provoke a smile, this gushing about a music one has never heard ; but, like the music of the spheres and the roar of the ocean, the nightingale’s voice is common property, and we all take it as a sort of hereditary music, descending to us by immemorial custom. Its notes are echoing within us, and we feel their authenticity, though in fact we know as little about the bird as chemists do about Geber. How shall we doubt that the bird whose song inspired Keats to write that masterpiece of English poetry is indeed a wonderful musician ? Shakespeare and rare Ben Jonson and Burns and Scott and Shelley and Byron heard this same song ; it was just as clear and sweet as it is now when Chaucer was telling his rhymed tales, when Robin Hood was in the greenwood, even when the Romans made their first invasion. In a general way, we do not think of the nightingale having a nest and rearing a brood and dying. It is simply the incomparable nightingale, philomela, rossignol, or whatever the name may be, — a bird that has been singing in rosegardens and orange-orchards and English woods night after night for thousands of years without a rival. Its song is to the imagination of all of us

as Lamartine has expressed it. So it can easily be understood how hard a struggle our American mocking-bird is going to have before it reaches a place in the world’s esteem beside the nightingale. Nor is it my purpose to do anything with a special view to aid it in the struggle; but I have studied our bird in all its haunts and in all seasons, with a view to a most intimate acquaintance with its habits, its song, and its character.

To begin with, the name mocking-bird is a heavy load for any bird to bear. Unmusical as it is, the worst feature of such an appellation is the idea of flippancy and ill-breeding that it conveys. To “ mock ” is to imitate with an illnatured purpose, to jeer at, to ridicule ; it was for mocking that bad children were made food for bears. Such a name carries with it a shadow of something repellant, and no poet can ever rescue it, as a name, from its meaning and its eight harsh consonants. It would indeed require some centuries of romantic and charming associations to make of it a name by which to conjure, as in the case of the nightingale. The bird, with almost any other name than mocking-bird, would fare much better at the hands of artists and poets, and might hope, if birds may hope at all, finally to gain the meed of praise it so richly deserves.

In a beautiful little valley among the mountains of North Georgia I first began to study the mocking-bird in its wild state. It was not a very common bird there, just rare enough to keep one keenly interested in its habits. I had great trouble in finding a nest. Many a delightful tramp through the thorny thickets and wild orchards of plum-trees ended in nothing, before my eyes discovered the loose sticks and matted midribs of leaves which usually make up the songster’s home. The haw-tree, several varieties of which grow in the glades of what is known as the Cherokee region, is a favorite nesting-place, and so is the honey-locust tree, which is also much chosen by the shrike or butcher-bird. There is so strong a resemblance in colors and size between this shrike and the mocking-bird that one is often mistaken for the other by careless observers, hence in some neighborhoods I have found a strong prejudice existing against the mocking-bird on account of the fiendish habits of the shrike.

A mountain lad once led me over a considerable mountain and down into a wild dell to show me a nest in a thorn tree, where he was sure I should find every evidence that a mocking-bird was a soulless monster, murdering little peewee fly-catchers and warblers, and impaling them on thorns out of sheer wantonness. I felt sure it was a shrike, but the boy said he knew better. Did n’t he know a mocking-bird when he saw it? He had heard it sing and “ mock ” all the birds in the thickets around, and had also seen it doing its brutal work. Boys are sometimes very close and reliable in their observations, and this one was an inveterate hunter, and so stoutly asserted his knowledge that I was induced to test his accuracy by going with him to the place he called Mocking-Bird Hollow. Of course the nest was that of a shrike, but a number of mockingbirds were breeding in the immediate vicinity, hence the mistake.

The mocking-bird does not appear to be a strictly migratory bird, its range being much narrower than that of the brown thrush, the cat-bird, and the woodthrush. I have never been able to find it a regular visitant in the West north of Tennessee, though I have no reason to doubt that it comes at times much farther, even into the Ohio valley. In the mountain valleys it is extremely wary and shy, its habits approaching very close to those attributed to the nightingale of England. It chooses lonely and almost inaccessible nesting-places, and will not sing if at all disturbed. Often, while I have been lying on the ground in some secluded glade, I have heard, far in the night, a sudden gush of melody begun by one bird and echoed by another and another all around me, filling the balmy air of spring with a halfcheerful, half-plaintive medley. This is more common when the moon shines, but I have heard it when the night was black.

At several points near the coast of the Carolinas I have found the mockingbird apparently a resident, and yet, so far South as Savannah, Georgia, it seems to shrink from the occasional midwinter rigors. In the hills near the Alabama River, not far from Montgomery, it is certainly resident, but I found it a much shyer bird there than in the thickets along the bayous of Louisiana. Early in the winter of 1883 I made a most careful search for the mocking-bird in Pensacola, Florida, and its environs, but found none. I was told that the bird would appear about the last of February. At Marianna, Florida, and along the line of the road thence to the Apalachicola River, I saw it frequently in midwinter. On the gulf coast, down as far as Punta Rassa, and across the peninsula to the Indian River country, in the orange, lemon, and citron groves, in the bay thickets, and even in the sandy pine woods, I noted it quite frequently. In this semi-tropical country it is not so shy and so chary of its song as it is farther north. Near the mouth of the St. Mark’s River, as I lay under a small tree, a mocking-bird came and lit on the top of a neighboring bush, and sang for me its rarest and most wonderful combination, called by the negroes the “ dropping song.” Whoever has closely observed the bird has noted its “ mounting song,” a very frequent performance, wherein the songster begins on the lowest branch of a tree and appears literally to mount on its music, from bough to bough, until the highest spray of the top is reached, where it will sit for many minutes flinging upon the air an ecstatic stream of almost infinitely varied vocalization. But he who has never heard the “ dropping song ” has not discovered the last possibility of the mocking-bird’s voice. I have never found any note of this extremely interesting habit of the bird by any ornithologist, a habit which is, I suspect, occasional, and connected with the most tender part of the mating season. It is, in a measure, the reverse of the “ mounting song,” beginning where the latter leaves off. I have heard it but four times, when I was sure of it, during all my rambles and patient observations in the chosen haunts of the bird ; once in North Georgia, twice in the immediate vicinity of Tallahassee, Florida, and once near the St. Mark’s River, as above mentioned. I have at several other times heard the song, as I thought, but not being able to see the bird, or clearly distinguish the peculiar notes, I cannot register these as certainly correct. My attention was first called to this interesting performance by an aged negro man, who, being with me on an egg-hunting expedition, cried out one morning, as a burst of strangely rhapsodic music rang from a haw thicket near our extemporized camp, “ Lis’n, mars, lis’n, dar, he’s a-droppin’, he’s a-droppin’, sho’s yo’ bo’n ! ” I could not see the bird, and before I could get my attention rightly fixed upon the song it had ended.

Something of the rare aroma, so to speak, of the curiously modulated trills and quavers lingered in my memory, however, along with Uncle Jo’s graphic description of the bird’s actions. After that I was on the lookout for an opportunity to verify the negro’s statements.

I have not exactly kept the date of my first actual observation, but it was late in April, or very early in May ; for the crab-apple trees, growing wild in the Georgian hills, were in full bloom, and spring had come to stay. I had been out since the first sparkle of daylight. The sun was rising, and I had been standing quite still for some minutes, watching a mocking-bird that was singing in a snatchy, broken way, as it fluttered about in a thick-topped crab-apple tree thirty yards distant from me. Suddenly the bird, a fine specimen, leaped like a flash to the highest spray of the tree and began to flutter in a trembling, peculiar way, with its wings halfspread and its feathers puffed out. Almost immediately there came a strange, gurgling series of notes, liquid and sweet, that seemed to express utter rapture. Then the bird dropped, with a backward motion, from the spray, and began to fall slowly and somewhat spirally down through the bloom-covered boughs. Its progress was quite like that of a bird wounded to death by a shot, clinging here and there to a twig, quivering, and weakly striking with its wings as it fell, but all the time it was pouring forth the most exquisite gushes and trills of song, not at all like its usual medley of improvised imitations, but strikingly, almost startlingly, individual and unique. The bird appeared to be dying of an ecstasy of musical inspiration. The lower it fell the louder and more rapturous became its voice, until the song ended on the ground in a burst of incomparable vocal power. It remained for a short time, after its song was ended, crouching where it had fallen, with its wings outspread, and quivering and panting as if utterly exhausted ; then it leaped boldly into the air and flew away into an adjacent thicket. Since then, as I have said, three other opportunities have been afforded me of witnessing this curiously pleasing exhibition of bird-acting. I can half imagine what another ode Keats might have written had his eyes seen and his ears heard that strange, fascinating, dramatically rendered song. Or it might better have suited Shelley’s powers of expression. It is said that the grandest bursts of oratory are those which contain a strong trace of a reserve of power. This may be true; but is not the best song that wherein the voice sweeps, with the last expression of ecstasy, from wave to wave of music until with a supreme effort it wreaks its fullest power, thus ending in a victory over the final obstacle, as if with its utmost reach ? Be this as it may, whoever may be fortunate enough to hear the mocking-bird’s “ dropping song,” and at the same time see the bird’s action, will at once have the idea of genius, pure and simple, suggested to him.

The high, beautiful country around Tallahassee, in Middle Florida, is the paradise of mocking-birds. I am surprised to find this region so little visited, comparatively speaking, by those who really desire to know all that is beautiful and interesting in our country. Perhaps it is because the places most frequented by the mocking-bird have not been sought by those deeply interested in bird-habits and history, that so little is known of the most striking traits of its character. Quite certain it is that no monograph exists which gives to the general reader any approximate idea of our great American singer. I must say just here that the mocking-bird’s song in captivity, strong and sweet as it is, and its voice from the cage, liquid, flexible, and pure, are not in the least comparable to what they are in the open-air freedom of a Southern grove. If you would hear these at their best, and they are truly worth going a long journey to hear, you must seek some secluded grove in Southern Alabama, Georgia, or Middle Florida about the last of March or the first of April, when spring is in its prime and the gulf breezes are flowing over all that semi-tropical region.

It is a silly notion, without any foundation in fact, that the mocking-bird in its wild state is a mere mimic, without a song of its own. The truth is that all birds get their notes, as we get our language, by imitating what they hear. Very few of them, however, are sufficiently gifted mentally and vocally to be able to pass the limitation of immemorial heredity, or to feel any impulse toward any attainments of voice beyond what they catch as younglings from their parents. Hence, as a rule, the young bird is satisfied with the pipes and calls caught from its immediate ancestors. No doubt a lack of finely developed vocal organs has much to do with this. But the mocking-bird, the brown thrush, and the cat-bird are notable exceptions to the rule. Nature has endowed them with an instinctive impulse toward a cultivation of their vocal powers, as well as with voices capable of wonderful achievements. A mocking-bird reared in captivity becomes much more a mere mimic than the wild bird, and yet, so strong is the hereditary tendency, the caged bird will perfectly sound the notes of a grossbeak or a blue-jay without ever having heard them. I have heard a mocking-bird, reared in a cage in Indiana, utter with singular accuracy the cry of the Southern woodpecker (Picus querulus), a bird I have never seen north of the Cumberland Mountains. Many little incidents noted in the woods and in the orchards haunted by the mocking-bird have led me to conclude that a genuine sense of the importance of singing well inspires some of its most remarkable efforts. One morning in March, 1881, I looked out of a window in the old City Hotel at Tallahassee, and witnessed a pitched battle of song between a brown thrush and a mocking-bird. In the grounds about the Capitol building across the street stood some venerable oak trees just beginning to leave out. The birds had each chosen a perch on the highest practicable point of a tree. They were not more than fifty feet apart, and with swelling throats were evidently vying fiercely with each other. This gave me the best possible opportunity of comparing their styles and methods of expression. To my ear the brown thrush in the wild state is a sweeter singer than any caged mocking-bird ; but when both are free, the latter is infinitely superior at every point. There is a wide variety of pure flute notes expressed by the wild mocking-bird. These notes become vitiated in captivity and their tone degraded to the level of mere mellow piping. In the hedges of Cherokee rose that grew along the old Augustine road east of Tallahassee, mocking-birds were so numerous that their songs, mingling together, made a strange din which could be heard a long way on a still morning.

I have already spoken of the injustice done the mocking-bird by the name given it, but at this point I may say that other American song birds of a superior order have suffered even more from this cause. Cat-bird and thrasher, — what names to be embalmed in poetry and romance ! It required all the genius of Emerson successfully to use a titmouse as the subject for a poem. If Bryant’s Lines to a Waterfowl had been addressed to a duck or a snake-bird, one would scarcely be content to accept the poem as perfect. A name certainly has an intrinsic value.

Mr. Cable in his powerful novel, Dr. Sevier, speaks of the mocking-bird’s morning note as unmusical. At certain seasons of the year the bird’s voice is not especially pleasing, but this is not in song-time. Early morning and the twilight of evening in the spring call forth its most charming powers. Its night song is sweet and peculiarly effective, but except on rare occasions in the nesting season, when the moon is very brilliant the nocturnal notes are pitched in a minor key and the voice is less flexible and brilliant, as if the bird were singing in its sleep.

In Florida and in the valley of the Alabama, I observed the mocking-bird assuming a familiarity with man very closely approaching voluntary domestication. A pair had their nest in a small vine-covered peach tree close to the window of a room for some weeks occupied by me. They seemed not in the least disturbed when I boldly watched them, though occasionally the male bird was inclined to scold if I raised the window. Every morning, just at the peep of dawn, the singing began, and was kept up at intervals all day. The house was a mere cabin with unchinked cracks. All out-door sounds came in freely. The Suwanee River, made famous by the Old Folks at Home, rippled near, and the heavy perfume of magnolia flowers filled the air. My vigorous exercise in the woods and fields by day, which was sometimes continued far into the night, made me sleep soundly, but very often I was aroused sufficiently to be aware of a nocturne, all the sweeter to my half-dreaming sense on account of its plaintive and desultory rendering. In the neighborhood of Thomasville, Georgia, a mocking-bird’s nest, built in a pear tree, was close to a kitchen door, where servants were all day passing in and out within ten or twelve feet of the sitting bird. The brood was hatched, and the young taken by a negro and sold to a New York tourist for twenty dollars. The birds tore up their nest as soon as it was robbed, and appeared greatly excited for a few days ; but one morning the singing began again, and soon after a new nest was built a little higher up in the same tree. It has been told of the mocking-birds that, in Louisiana and other Southern regions, when such of them as have taken a summer jaunt to New England or Pennsylvania return to the magnolia and orange groves in late autumn, they are attacked by their resident brethren. My observation has not tended to verify this. Nor can I bear testimony to the bravery and fighting qualities of the mockingbird. The blue-bird whips it, driving it hither and yon at will, though not more than half its size. It is, however, a famous scold and blusterer, accomplishing a good deal by fierce threats and savage demonstrations. I do not believe the story about it killing snakes. It would be a very small and weak reptile that such a bird could kill, being so poorly armed for warlike exploits.

On a pedestrian tour through the loveliest and loneliest part of Middle Florida, I was struck with the strong contrast between the negroes and the white people as to the extent and accuracy of their ornithological knowledge, a contrast almost as marked as that of color. I could get no information from the whites. They had never paid any attention to mocking-birds. The subject appeared to them too slight and trivial to be worth any study. But the negroes were sometimes enthusiastic, always interested and interesting. Somehow there has always seemed to me a fine touch of power in the way a cabin, a few banana stalks, a plum tree or two, and a straggling bower of grape-vines get themselves together for the use of indolent negroes and luxury-loving mocking-birds. I have fancied it, or else there is a marked preference shown by the songster for the cots of the freedmen, and there can be no doubting that a warm feeling for the bird is nursed by the ordinary negro.

As I have suggested, the nature of the mocking-bird is that of a resident more than that of a migratory bird, and I am inclined to name its true habitat semi-tropical. Even so far South as Macon, Ga., and in the region of Montgomery, Ala., the chilly days of midwinter are sufficient to drive the birds to heavy cover. In fact, a large majority of the species of Mimus (Mimus polyglottus being the scientific name of the mocking-bird) are to be found in South America and in the tropical islands of the Atlantic. The plantation negroes used to have a saying which might serve the turn of Mr. Harris or Mr. Macon : “ Takes a red-hot sun fo’ ter bri’l de mockin’-bird’s tongue, but er mighty small fros’ er gwine ter freeze ’im froat up solid.” Mr. Fred. A. Ober, in his report of explorations made in the Okeechobee region, does not mention seeing the mocking-bird, but it is there, nevertheless, or was in 1867. I remember seeing a fine fellow flying about in some small bushes, near the remains of a deserted cabin, on the northeastern shore of the lake. I saw some paroquets at the same place.

On what is known as the Dauphine Way, running west from Dauphine Street in Mobile, mocking-birds used to be numerous, nesting in the groves on either side and filling the air with their songs. Whoever has walked out on this lovely road will remember a low, oldfashioned brick house, no doubt a plantation residence one day, with a row of queer little dormer windows on the roof in front, and graduated parapets to hide the gables, a long lean-to veranda and a row of chimneys, a dark, heavy-looking building near the south side of the Way. In a small tree just east of this house used to sing a mocking-bird whose voice was as much above the average of his kind as Patti’s voice is above the average woman’s voice. If one could get a caged bird to sing as that one did, he might profitably advertise it for concerts. A friend and I sat down across the Way from the house, and, while the gulf breeze poured over us and the bird music filled our ears, got a sketch of the charmingly picturesque old place; but somehow we could not put in the song of the wonderful mocking-bird.

Bird-fanciers and bird-buyers may profit by what I now whisper to them, to wit: the best-voiced mocking-birds, without a doubt, are those bred in Middle Florida and Southern Alabama. I have no theory in connection with this statement of a fact; but if I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of a mocking-bird against a European nightingale, I should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile.

No doubt proper food has much to do with the development of the bird in all its parts, and it may be that the dry, fertile, chocolate-tinted hills that swell up along the gulf coast produce just the berries, insects, and other tid-bits needed for the mocking-bird’s fullest growth. Then, perhaps, the climate best suits the bird’s nature. Be this as it may, I have found no birds elsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirty miles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee, to some miles west of Mobile. Nor is there anywhere a more interesting country to him who delights in pleasant wildwood rambles, unusual scenery, and a wonderful variety of birds and flowers in their season. Most of our descriptive ornithologists have taken great pains to assure their readers that the American mocking-bird is very plain, if not positively unattractive in its plumage. But to my eye the graceful little fellow, especially when flying, is an object of real beauty. There is a silver-white flash to his wings, along with a shimmer of gray, and a dusky, shadowy twinkle, so to speak, about his head and shoulders, as you see him fluttering through the top of an orange tree or climbing, in his peculiar zigzag way, the gnarled boughs of a fig bush. His throat and breast are the perfection of symmetry, and his eyes are clear pale gold, bright and alert. The eggs of the mocking-bird are delicate and shapely, having a body color of pale, ashy green tinged with blue and blotched with brown. The eggs of the shrike closely resemble those of the mocking-bird, so that the amateur naturalist is often deceived. The nests of the two birds are also very much alike in shape and materials, and the places in which they are usually found are exactly similar, a lonely thorny tree being preferred, if in the wildwood, and a pear tree or a plum tree if in an orchard.

I am quite sure that every one who has studied, or who hereafter may study, the mocking-bird in its proper haunts will agree with me that its voice is something far more marvelous than has ever been

dreamed of by those who have heard it only from the cage, and especially will the lover of high dramatic art and consummate individuality of manner and vocalization be charmed with the bird’s exquisite “ dropping song,” if once he has the good fortune to witness its delivery and hear its rhythmic gushes of rapture.

Maurice Thompson.