Saratoga News

The mockingbird stakes out its territory with a tune

By Carl Heintze

These hot summer nights, there's a nightingale singing outside our bedroom window all night long.

Actually, it is not a nightingale. It's a California chat, also known as a mockingbird. It starts to sing about the time it gets dark, and it keeps it up until after dawn. Then it goes somewhere to rest. I wish I could.

The bird (actually, there are a couple in the neighborhood) sits on the highest point around and trills away. The highest point used to be our TV antenna, but now we have cable, so the mockingbird has had to go to the telephone pole or a very tall liquidambar in the front lawn.

It's unfortunate, but mockingbirds have no real song of their own. They copy or mock the songs of others, but not, so far as I can see, in any rational order. Their continuous output is strung together without reason and rises from trills to sort of bleats, quite unbird like.

Ornithologists tell us that mockingbirds go through their nightly routine in the summer as a way of establishing territoriality after they have built a nest somewhere. They are telling other males to stay out of their neighborhood and go raise their young somewhere else. I feel the same way about the mockingbird. My bedroom is my territory. He's invading it each and every night. He's keeping me from sleeping.

I don't sleep well in the daytime. He apparently does.

So, as far as I am concerned, one mockingbird in the neighborhood is one too many. It would be nice if they would pick another season of the year to belt out their happy claim to local trees and shrubs. Winter would be nice--when the windows are closed. But their mocking season happens to coincide with summer, a time when the weather in California is warm enough that it is pleasant to sleep with the windows open. If you can sleep, of course, with an endless kind of bird rock & roll rippling through the neighborhood.

In non-nesting season, the mockingbirds seem to lose the ability to mock or get tired of the game, All they can come up with for the rest of the year is a very unpleasant screech.

Fortunately, in other times of the year they don't screech at night, though they do bounce around trees and along fences with a peculiar bobbing motion which seems to say: Watch it, buddy; I'll be back next summer and I'll be louder than ever.

I've never found anyone who has had a practical solution to the summer night serenades. I have tried many different solutions to the problem. On at least one occasion, I have been angry enough to go outside in the dark at about 2 a.m. and hurl a few rocks in the direction of the offending bird. The bird quiets down for a little while--it seems like shocked silence on his part: "how could you not enjoy my beautiful song"--and then it's back at it again in a slightly different place.

I think I might have some compassion for the mockingbird if he sang in the morning or afternoon or even if he sang a consistent tune. But, as I say, the tune is never consistent or the same, and one tends to lie in bed, ear cocked, wondering, even dreading, what's coming next.

If you think about it, most birds have consistent songs. Quail, for instance. Repeated, their song tends to be restful and reassuring. The mockingbird, on the other hand, doesn't even have the dreadful consistency of a rap singer. It just blats all over the place irregularly and keeps you awake.

Well, I guess by now you have gleaned than my feelings for the mockingbird are somewhat different than those I have for our other feathered friends. Most bird calls are pleasant and add a certain charm to spring and early summer. The mockingbird just seems designed to annoy mankind, at least this mankind.

I think, however, I have found a way for us to live in the neighborhood together. Or, to paraphrase The Graduate, I've got one word for you about mockingbirds: earplugs. They let you sleep and the mockingbird sing (or whatever it is that mockingbirds do) and we both can live happily ever after.

Besides, how long can summer last?

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Saratoga News.