Hi All! I think you will enjoy this video featuring a Northern Mockingbird, singing from its perch in an apple tree in late June. I captured the footage about a year ago in nearby Finger Lakes National Forest (near Trumansburg, NY), and I’ve just gotten around to editing and publishing it to Vimeo. I was in charge of the videotaping and my assistant Beth Bannister did the sound recording. We’re quite happy with the result and I look forward to editing additional footage obtained during the same outing.
Being a mockingbird, it is not surprising that he throws-in a number of imitations of the sounds made by other birds. You may not hear them at first (because he sings quite a few of his own melodies), but starting about a third of the way through, listen for song-phrases that remind you of northern cardinal (whistled songs @ 0:29), tufted titmouse (whistled songs@ 0:45), ring-billed gull (squeals … maybe? @ 0:49), blue jay (sputter call © 0:59), gray catbird (kwut alarm calls @ 1:04), white-breasted nuthatch (yank calls @ 1:24), wood thrush (musical song @ 1:39), eastern towhee (chuwee concern call @ 1:53), northern flicker (wicka-wicka-wicka @ 1:57), hairy woodpecker (sputter call @ 2:00), red-bellied woodpecker (churr calls during fade-out @ 2:12) … and perhaps more!
As always, I truly appreciate your feedback, so please leave a comment below, especially if you hear imitations that I have not listed (or else disagree with one or more of my identifications).
Naturally Yours,
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Simply……beautiful! Thanks for sharing this!
If only you could have seen my cat when I played my first track – the “Northern Mocking bird”
Thanks Mr. Elliott! This brought a smile to my face hearing his “song”. Please keep up with your work, I think it’s great!
Lang,
Merlin on my phone found Northern Mockingbird, Purple Martin, Northern Cardinal, Tufted Titmouse, California Thrasher, White-breasted Nuthatch, Eastern Tohee, Downy Woodpecker, Common Tern.
Fun!
That was so cool. Thanks for sharing!!! I have lots of birds in my yard year round. But the Blue Jays are the most plentiful. I also have Mourning Doves, Cardinals, and the occasional Hawk hoping to nab one of our plentiful Squirrels. We used to have annual visitors from Mexico on their way back home. Yellow Crowned Night Herons but the neighbors (I live in a townhome community with very old huge Live Oaks everywhere) complained so much about the mess the babies made that the city got involved with their cannons and fog horns until they no longer… Read more »
Ok, in need of a laugh? i have to admit i had no idea for the reason behind the name Mockingbird. I have a bad habit of surface reading. I can also admit that my son had no clue either. I appreciate the enlightenment, Lang. Am i right in believing that Jays have similar talent? Enjoyed this video very much!!!
Blue Jays do some imitating, mostly of hawk calls. Their imitation of the red-shouldered hawk’s scream is so good that I’ve been fooled into thinking a hawk was around, until I finally heard more typical jay calls, coming from exactly the same location.
I have always enjoyed my resident Catbirds and think of them as composing. The following Wired research article on a study of Mockingbirds will give you some context.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-mockingbirds-compose-songs-like-beethoven/
Nice article! And I see that my friend David Rothenberg was involved in its creation. I have long been aware of the “relatedness” of many phrase transitions, one giving rise to a similar next. And it is interesting how the ramble may instantly transition into a clear imitation. But sometimes they do switch to unrelated phrases. It’s not always a smooth transition. Also, I’ve heard imitations happen in real time. I have one recording of a mocker from Florida. He’s singing right along when a bird in the background calls and instantly the mocker imitates that call. I’ll have find… Read more »
Related article by David:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mockingbirds-are-better-musicians-than-we-thought/
Related video by David: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwD0ij_CWoM
My friend laughs when I say the Catbird sings Jazz but I have thought of it as free association Jazz that then Hits the “refrain”.
Thanks for your great recording.
WONDERFUL! Thank you so much for this entertaining “music video!” It’s interesting to see the bird’s throat moving and how he uses his beak to create various sounds. Fun & educational!
Yes, they he is very expressive with his beak and throat.
What a beautiful way to start my morning—truly a delight to view and listen to while sitting here with my coffee and with the windows closed against the already humid morning air and any local bird song. Thank you!
lovely Lang I love listening to mimics. The best i had this year was a common redstart a small European chat. it was in northern England but it imitated a European bee-eater, injecting a Latinate note into our Anglo Saxon songosphere.
So good to hear from you Mark. I’m sure you’re busy as always, writing new books and traveling to faraway places … not mention wrestling with cassowaries! I was just browsing your website. So are you moving to Derbyshire? To be at one with nature?
Wow! Love not only the outstanding repertoire of the “Mocker”, but the stunning 4K video makes it seem you are there! Totally immersive. To be honest, all your video blogs of birds, amphibians, mammals, etc, match your talent of capturing soundscapes! So real, you are there! Thanks, Lang!
I hope to shoot a lot of new 4K video next season, focusing on birds but also more frogs and insects. Maybe I’ll even get out there with my camera this coming August and September, for singing insects. We’ll see if I can find the time.
I could identify one bird that you missed, it was the hawk. The shrill sound of the hawk as it calls to it’s young, come and hunt.
Cool, but please tell me when you hear it in the recording.
A delightful performance by the well-named Mimus polyglottos. And I thought Brown Thrashers were garrulous! Well done, Lang.
Yup … polyglottos for sure! And if it were a female, I’d name it Polly Glottis … “Well there you go, Polly is at it again!”
Oh my goodness, this is an absolute delight!! Thank you!
Wonderful sound and video you and Beth did! I’m not up on North American bird songs, but this little Pavarotti brought back nice memories when we had mockingbirds at our summer home in PA
when I was a boy. Thanks, Lang.
: >)
Thank you for this recording. If the mockingbird doesn’t have double vocal chords as the thrush, how does it imitate. I didn’t hear imitation of thrush, but perhaps I need to listen more closely. He could only do the sounds that don’t vibrate. I’ve been trying to differentiate between the wood, hermit, swainsey, and veery thrush. Maybe you have recordings? I once heard a mockingbird imitate a dog barking! As a writer, I started a children’s story about a relationship between a dog and the mockingbird. Anyway, why the mockingbird imitates others?
There are many theories about why birds imitate. A popular one is that the male is able to increase his repertoire of song types, which is attractive to potential mates, or which demonstrate prowess to other males. Nice idea, but then why don’t all songbirds imitate if the payoff is that significant? Nobody really has solid answers. An evolutionary biologist might conclude that this tendency may be restricted to certain groups (such as mimic thrushes in this case) where, for whatever reason, female selection for song variety somehow took hold way back before the group gave rise to additional species.… Read more »
As I understand it, all songbirds have two-sided voice boxes. From Encyclopedia Brittanica: “Songbirds, and probably other birds, are able to control the right and left halves of the syrinx separately thus singing with two independent voices.”
Thanks for your response. Sometimes mystery is more beautiful than explanation and leaves room for imagination and story. The hermit thrush thrills me with song and as I walk in the woods and listen, life becomes more sacred. The bluebird chortle does indeed make me feel happy, especially in January when I came across a flock of them in a tree here in New Hampshire. By the way, I grew up in the Finger Lakes, in the Watkins Glen area. I will never be the same…and I’m glad for it. Thanks for the recordings. I just listened to the catbird… Read more »
What an agile little singer he is! I wonder… was he born with this ability, or does he learn the songs as he becomes acquainted with the birds in his neighborhood? And, I’ve heard it’s just the male that sings. Whatever the reason, he is such a delight! Looking forward to sharing this clip with my music students at school. Maybe we can imitate him with instruments! Thanks, Lang!
They do in fact learn the sounds from their environment, although it’s important to note that the males also sing many song phrases that appear to be of their own making (not imitations).
I love the mockingbird. It’s song lifts my spirits.
I think that you have it all wrong. The mockingbird teaches the other species his songs!
As I ponder it, I think you’re right. So I googled and discovered that the great spirit created Tàskëmus (wrongly known to us as Mockingbird) … he who spins songs for all birds.
Love that. Maybe he’s the music teacher in his aviary!
Lovely! Northern Mockingbirds are so talented and entertaining! Thanks for sharing this great recording. Perhaps we should enter him/her into America’s Got Talent, or one of those other talent contests!
While he might not be the prettiest singer among our native songbirds, he certainly is one of the most versatile (along with other mimic thrushes such as the brown thrasher and gray catbird)
Yes indeed
Wow, Lang, I always love hearing your recordings but this time getting to SEE the bird is a real treat! Thank you fro your hard work bringing these beautiful sounds of nature right to our headphones, wherever we are!
Just wonderful!
Delightful! I loved its cardinal, nuthatch and wood thrush imitations– mockingbirds are such fun birds.
Wonderful! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve always enjoyed how Mockers do songs of lots of other birds.
I consider it a treat when I am woken in the night by a mockingbird singing. I listen to your recordings sometimes at night while I fall asleep pretending I am somewhere else. My favorite spot for night sounds is Trader’s Hill near Folkston, GA.. Along with moss and fern draped live oaks making for a beautiful campsite, the late night sounds of Barred owl and Whip-poor-will keep you happily awake. Thanks for your recordings!!
Hi Bill! have recorded several times at Trader’s Hill (at the campground) and I have a lot of great material from nearby Okefenokee NWR. I’ve done three canoe expeditions there, the last one in 2019. Love the wet prairies.
If you have a recording of Trader’s Hill I will purchase it from you!! I have camped there 3 times and have been to Okie I think 7. It feels like home to me. I know you have experienced true silence. I think I have once. It was in the Pinacate in Mexico on my honeymoon. We climbed a large hill early morning looking for bighorns and I could hear the chop chop chop of a helicopter. Realized it was my heart beat. Let me know about Trader’s Hill. Thanks.
I had Northern Mockingbirds in a tree behind my lanai when I lived in Florida. They sang all day long. Loved it. Hi Lang. A voice from the past.
Beth: So good to hear from you! Where are you living now?
Great footage and sound Lang. The deliberate movement of this bird when singing and the pitch and tempo of the song almost give the impression it is in slow motion. I mean, compared with a smaller, hyperactive songbird with a higher-pitched song like a wren!
They do sing quite deliberately, and with a pace that is more resonant with the human time scale … at least in comparison to little jittery birds with hurried songs. There’s probably a strong relationship with size. The bigger the bird, the slower and lower the song. That’s why little hurried bird songs sound more musical, more appealing, when played half speed and at half-pitch (like what happens when reel-to-reel recordings are slowed down). Our thrushes are sort of half way in between. They are beautiful as is, but at the same time do benefit by being slowed down and… Read more »
QUITE the performance you captured here Lang 🙂
Not having grown up among these birds, I quite delight whenever I hear them in my local Asheville area walks :-)…..
(though I don’t think I’ve ever heard one who presented so many different tunes !)
Thank you dear heart 🙂
I have a wonderful mockingbird recording I made many years ago where most every utterance was an imitation. I’ll try to drum it up. I even created a second recording where I inserted recordings of the birds being imitated, so that one can hear the similarities up close. Hopefully I’ll be able to find it in my archives.
I hope you find it. That would be a real treat!
Wow! I would LOVE to hear that recording!!
Love this bird. Only see on in the back yard at my Neighbors yard between us.
Thank you for recording it.
I played this for my cockatiels. They were excited especially when they heard bird sounds like the ones in our backyard.
Thank you, Lang. I loved this so much & shared it with my bird-loving grandchildren!
You’re welcome Mar!
i love mockingbirds so much. They are just such wild characters. once i stood in the middle of washington dc, and listened to. one atop a church spire, singing away, telling the politicians how little they mean. i remember tom robbins including them in one of his books, and mary oliver often includes them. This is one of the beginning lines of a poem of hers that i love: “This morning two mockingbirds in the green field were spinning and tossing the white ribbons of their songs into the air. I had nothing better to do than listen. I mean… Read more »
oh and once i heard one on the Eastern shore of maryland at a wild life preserve who had mastered the call of an osprey. 🙂
Nice Mary Oliver poem, one I haven’t see before.
Excellent capture! Thank you for sharing, and for your work.
On her album ‘Whales & Nightingales‘, released in 1970, Judy Collins sang ‘Nightingale‘, which contained the following lyrics ~
In the orchard, the nightingale sang.
And the plums the she broke with her brown beak
Tomorrow would turn into song.
We should elide the references to she and her in deference to the song’s lyrical poesy..
Agreed!
I so enjoyed this. I miss mockingbirds where I live. They have such a wealth of songs and calls. I counted 27 different ones in this recording. Pretty great! Thanks so much, Lang.
Patty: How many of those different song phrases do you think are imitations?
My cats really enjoyed this one – as did I.
It might be challenging to do, but it would be helpful to have a time associated with each of the bird songs that Jack is replicating.
Done! Check text above; I’ve added the times when a species is first heard.
Thanks! Those are close to what I had written down for myself.
What a wonderful array of calls captured from this most interesting bird. Thank you.
Amazing. I have always wondered about the variety of sounds that mockingbirds make. Thank you. This one put on quite a display for you. Thank you.
Fabulous!!! That would put a smile on anybody’s face :0)