Bird Study 95 



and depressing and jerking the tail. A good mocker will learn a tune, or 

 parts of it, if it is whistled often enough in his hearing; he will also 

 imitate other sounds and will often improve on a song he has learned from 

 another bird by introducing frills of his own; when learning a song, he 

 sits silent and listens intently, but will not try to sing it until it is learned. 



Although the mockingbirds live in wild places, they prefer the haunts 

 of men, taking up their home sites in gardens and cultivated grounds. 

 Their flight is rarely higher than the tree tops and is decidedly jerky in 

 character with much twitching of the long tail. For nesting sites, they 

 choose thickets or the lower branches of trees, being especially fond of 

 orange trees; the nest is usually from four to twenty feet from the ground. 

 The foundation of the nest is made of sticks, grasses and weed stalks 

 interlaced and crisscrossed; on these is built the nest of softer materials, 

 such as, rootlets, horsehair, cotton, or in fact, anything suitable which is 

 at hand. The nest is often in plain sight, since the mocker trusts to his 

 strength as a fighter to protect it. He will attack cats with great ferocity 

 and vanquish them; he will kill snakes; often good-sized black snakes 

 have been known to end thus. The mocker, in making his attack, hovers 

 above his enemy and strikes it at the back of the head or neck; he will 

 also drive away birds much larger than himself. 



The female lays from four to six pale greenish or bluish eggs 

 blotched with brown and which hatch in about two weeks; then 

 comes a period of hard work for the parents, as both are indefatigable 

 in catching insects to feed the young. The mocker, by the way, is a 

 funny sight when he is chasing a beetle on the ground, lifting his wings 

 in a pugnacious fashion. The mockers often raise three broods a 

 season ; the young birds have spotted breasts, showing their relationship 

 to the thrasher. 



As a wooer, the mocker is a bird of much ceremony and dances into his 

 lady's graces. Mrs. F. W. Rowe, in describing this, says that the birds 

 stand facing each other with heads and tails erect and wings drooping; 

 "then the dance would begin, and this consisted of the two hopping 

 sideways in the same direction and in rather a straight line a few inches at 

 a time, always keeping directly opposite each other and about the same 

 distance apart. They would chassez this way four or five feet, then go 

 back over the same line in the same manner." Mrs. Rowe also observed 

 that the male mockers have hunting preserves of their own, not allowing 

 any other males of their species in these precincts. The boundary was 

 sustained by tactics of both offense and defense; but certain other species 

 of birds were allowed to trespass without reproof. 



Maurice Thompson describes in a delightful manner the "mounting" 

 and ' 'dropping' ' songs of the mocker which occur during the wooing season . 

 The singer flits up from branch to branch of a tree, singing as he goes, and 

 finally on the topmost bough gives his song of triumph to the world; then, 

 reversing the process, he falls backward from spray to spray, as if drunk 

 with the ecstasy of his own song, which is an exquisitely soft "gurgling 

 series of notes, liquid and sweet, that seem to express utter rapture." 



The mockingbirds have the same colors in both sexes; the head is 

 black, the back is ashy-gray ; the tail and wings are so dark brown that 

 they look black; the tail is very long and has the outer tail feathers 

 entirely white and the tvv^o next inner ones are white for more than half 

 their length; the wings have a strikingly broad, white bar, which is very 



