“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

There is a mockingbird that claims a good portion of our yard. It starts singing early in the morning and goes on all day. It switches between a couple of large oaks on the far side of our driveway and the twisted maple at the edge of our front yard. I recorded a minute or so of its song.

mockingbird

The bird is at the top of the maple, only a speck in this movie. It’s amazing that such a small bird can make such a big song. There is also another songbird singing its own song at the same time. I recognize a a lot of the mockingbird’s songs, but I can identify only a few of the birds being mocked.

Although I didn’t catch it in this clip, this mockingbird includes a whip-poor-will’s song as well as a blue jay’s. I wonder if they ever sing the pileated woodpecker’s song.

The quote from To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t really right about what mockingbirds do; their singing happens to please us, but of course it’s not singing for our pleasure. It’s actually a way to attract mates and claim territory. According to birders, only bachelor mockingbirds sing at night. That means the mockingbird that was singing outside the ICU the night my father died was a bachelor. It was a warm night, even though it was late winter. A window was open, so we could hear the mockingbird. It sounded like it was right next to the window. You might imagine that hearing a mockingbird’s song on the night my father died would spoil their singing for me, but it didn’t work that way. There’s not a sound in nature much better than a mockingbird’s song.