296 BULLETIN 195, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



have something when he heard his first mockingbird, and from his 

 far-off day to this the bird has held primary affection in the minds of 

 thousands who thrill to its matchless ability of song. 



Audubon expatiated upon the advisability of hearing the mocker 

 only amid the magnolias of Louisiana. Since he knew Carolina later, 

 a native of the latter State would have expected Audubon to change 

 that setting, but doubtless he never found time to rewrite his history of 

 the bird ! Seriously, however, everything in his opening paragraphs 

 on this species, in which he dilates upon the botanical glories of the 

 Pelican State, could have been written with equal accuracy of the 

 Carolina Low Country. Charleston, the center of that favored region, 

 and the mockingbird are inseparable, for that is where it was first seen 

 and made known to science by an ornithologist. 



Linnaeus described the bird from notes furnished by Mark Catesby 

 on what the latter called the "Mock-Bird of Carolina" and whose own 

 account of the species appears in his "Natural History of Carolina, 

 Florida and the Bahama Islands," published in 1731, and accompanied 

 by a drawing. Carolinians, then, have a proprietary interest in the 

 mockingbird. Actually it occurs much farther afield, of course, but at 

 the same time, wherever the name is mentioned, the hearer inevitably 

 thinks of the South as the typical habitat. 



Surely, this is as it should be. Can anyone visualize the gray-clad 

 aristocrat amid snow and ice, amid spruces and hemlocks, or upon cliffs 

 battered by the might of the north Atlantic? Can one visualize it, 

 indeed, without mental pictures of moss-bannered live oaks or towering 

 magnolias, where the yellow jessamine climbs aloft to burst in golden 

 glory among the pines and cypresses and the immaculate disks of 

 Cherokee roses reflect the moonlight ? Here, along coasts fringed with 

 semitropical jungles of barrier islands, where the slow heave of rollers 

 out of the Gulf Stream thunders softly upon yielding sands, is the 

 mocker's home. Here, amid the crimson clusters of cassina and holly 

 the mocker lives, or is equally at home in a moon-drenched old city 

 whose garden walls and graceful spires reflect the golden civilization of 

 a vanished era. Yes, to Charlestonians and other Carolinians, the 

 entire scope of ornithology might be summed up and typified in a 

 single species, and that species . . . the mockingbird ! 



Spring. — Almost universally considered a southern bird, the mocker 

 has undoubtedly been increasing its range northward and westward 

 in recent years. It is now well known in New England and as far 

 west as Knox County, 111., and parts of Iowa (Monroe County). Pos- 

 sibly this spreading population might be considered as an "overflow" 

 from the normal range, somewhat like certain other species that have 

 apparently thrived upon the march of civilization and increased rather 

 than decreased in numbers. While most mockingbird populations in 

 the South appear to be largely stable (the writer is unable, for in- 



