Mimus polyglottos

The Back 40 (Inches) is what I call my rented backyard. It is in the southeast corner pocket of a Brooklyn, NY, USA, block. Next door to the south, over a brick wall, is a double Land Rover parking space sandwiched between two ruins (house, carriage house; all owned by the very idle rich). Next door to the north over a plastic fence is a pile of junk from a partial house-gutting, now all tangled with weeds. Directly back over a wooden fence, filling in the rest of the property lot of my building, is a larger weedy yard, mostly used by a sweet, neurotic one-eyed dog.
For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a northern mockingbird around out back. This has been the case for the several years now, although, considering the short lifespan of most songbirds, this probably isn’t the same bird.
Mockingbirds — I photographed this one in Prospect Park — are long-tailed birds, blue-gray above and pale below with distinctive flashes of white on the wings and tail feathers (best seen in flight). They’re mimids, members of the Mimidae family, which is also represented in our area by the gray catbird and the brown thrasher. The mockingbird isn’t nearly as numerous here in the city as the starling, pigeon, and house sparrow. You are more likely to see them in suburbia, but they are definitely present here. Keep a sharp eye out on hedges and shrubs, in the parks and the shrubby interiors of city blocks.

The thing is, it’s more likely that you’ll hear one. These birds are wonderful, prodigious singers, so much so that they were caged throughout the 19th century by bird and music fanciers. They were in fact nearly extirpated in parts of the northeast because of the trade, which is now illegal.

The term mimid comes from the same root as mimic, and the mockingbird is an excellent mimic, incorporating the songs and calls of many other birds. One of the reasons they seem to do this may be because they want to shoo off those species from their particular patch of terrain. Mockingbirds are quite aggressive and territorial.

But birdsong is not all that the mockingbird will incorporate, or mimic, or mock. This is, after all, the city, and mockingbirds, like you and I, hear the sounds around them. Most bird species have a single song, with regional variations, and some calls. A male mockingbird, on the other wing, may learn 150-200 songs in his life; like any performer, he needs material. Like an early 20th century avant garde composer, the urban mockingbird finds inspiration in the mechanical sounds that are now part of his ecosystem.

I’ve woken up to one of those damned car alarms that have the multiple phase sound effects, only to realize something was rather wrong with that sound. It wasn’t a car. It was a mockingbird. Other reported instances of mockingbird mimicry include lawn sprinklers and weed-whackers.

In most birds it is the male that sings, to announce himself to females and his territory to other males. As we understand it, he is communicating to the females: look at me, I’m the best nest-maker/egg fertilizer/gene-pool-enricher around. To the other males of his ilk, he has this message: scram, punks, dis is all mine. As noted, the mockingbird is an aggressive, territorial bird, and will sing for long patches to let us know that this is the case. The unmated males are the most active singers. Full of testosterone with no place to go, he’ll sing all day long, and he will sing in the dark, at both ends of the day, sometimes relentlessly so, at least for those who are trying to sleep. We don’t have the Beatle’s “blackbird singing in the dead of the night,” but this comes close.

The other day, after hearing him for days, I finally actually saw my mocker. I saw two, in fact, so I suspect there is some courting taking place. There is a vine-wrapped structure a couple of house lots over, strung with utility wires, which looks Einstein’s hair before it leafs out. It’s often crowded with house sparrows; this where I saw my local mockingbirds.

The enclosed spaces created by our fondness for grid street patterns seem to me to be under-appreciated as habitat. A confinement of townhouse backyards, with a very random mix of native and invasive plants, some of it weedy and scrubby, some of it elaborately gardened, with fruit trees and grape vines reminding us of earlier residents. These rectangular islands of green can be seen from the next green block over because the larger trees poke above the buildings. Is there even a word for these interior blocks? What is a collection of backyards called?