To Hear a Mockingbird

Until phonographs became commercially available at the end of the 19th century, the only way you could hear a song was to be in the presence of someone, human or otherwise, who was making music. There was no chatter of a radio or melody from a record player to serve as the backdrop of daily life, and in the absence of a dedicated pianist or fiddler, birds seemed like the best option for filling a home with pleasant song. And there was no question about which bird was the best singer for the job. As the ornithologist Alexander Wilson proclaimed in 1810, the mockingbird’s “variety of vocal powers stands unrivalled by the whole feathered songsters of this or perhaps any other country.”¹

For the century following Wilson’s 1810 pronouncement, the mockingbird would be a common part of daily life — commonly caged, commonly sold, commonly referenced in music, and commonly used to symbolize the South. Even as the mockingbird’s ubiquity has faded to the point that most Americans today would struggle to recognize the bird or its famous song, this “celebrated and very extraordinary bird” still occupies an outsized place in our art and culture.² 

Choristers of America

During spring courtship, a male Northern Mockingbird will pick a high point like a tree or a chimney or a light post about an hour before dawn, throw back his head, and begin rattling off a succession of pilfered songs from other birds he’s overheard. Taking full advantage of his incredible ability to recall and reproduce sound, the mockingbird might move fluidly from the call of a robin to the screech of a blue jay to the whistle of a phoebe. One by one, he will sample songs of chickadees and bluebirds and then throw in a frog’s croak or the chirp of a car locking its doors for good measure. The average male mockingbird knows around 150 songs and will cycle through them to mark his territory or woo a mate. Even before they reach maturity, you can hear young mockingbirds practicing their routine –- imperfectly repeating songs, almost under their breath, in an effort to perfect their performance before taking the stage. 

It did not take long for European settlers to become captivated with the charismatic mockingbirds hanging around their settlements. One English traveler wrote in 1709 that these “Choristers of America,” as he called them, were “always attending our Dwellings,” perching upon chimneys and other high points, singing from morning to evening.³ Of course, it was not enough to enjoy the songs from wild birds that wafted through the windows. English colonists brought the European practice of caging songbirds with them to America, and applied it enthusiastically to the wildlife of their new home. 

After stealing young mockingbirds from their nest or trapping them as adults, bird fanciers intensively trained their captives in song, whether by whistling tunes or caging them with another skilled mockingbird. But learning came naturally to these birds, and they easily picked up sounds from their environment. They might entertain themselves by whistling to beckon a dog, creaking like a passing wheelbarrow, copying a cat’s meow, or recreating the calls of its fellow winged inmates, performed like a recital, each in quick succession. This variation was a major draw of the mockingbird as a pet – not only could they sing beautifully, but every song was different given their preference for continually modulating their performance. 

Making the Caged Bird Sing

Mockingbirds were widely kept as pets, particularly in the south, and particularly by the wealthy.  And both before and after emancipation, the supply of pet mockingbirds depended on Black labor and expertise. Maurice Thompson, while on an 1884 trip to Florida, described being “struck with the strong contrast between the negroes and the white people as to the extent and accuracy of their ornithological knowledge,” and was disappointed that whites “had never paid any attention to mocking-birds,” as “the subject appeared to them too slight and trivial to be worth any study.”⁴ 

The Virginian plantation owner and eventual president Thomas Jefferson had at least four pet mockingbirds. Jefferson’s favorite among his birds was named Dick, which he “cherished with peculiar fondness, not only for its melodious powers, but for its uncommon intelligence and affectionate disposition.”⁵ Jefferson bought his birds from James and Martin Hemmings, men that he had enslaved. A hundred years later, one pet dealer claimed that “the negroes are usually the trappers, and many obtain their living from trapping.”⁶ Another complained of the “burning shame that the negro of Louisianna cannot find a better mode of earning his livelihood than by the trapping of mocking birds.”⁷ While it’s unclear how much of the market for mockingbirds they actually provided, African Americans served as a convenient scapegoat for a trade that many people found distasteful, while simultaneously withholding judgment for the affluent white consumers that drove its demand.

Commodities in Cages

Advertisements for mockingbirds were a common feature in newspapers throughout the country, and they were sold at an impressive scale. One dealer in Fort Worth, Texas posted an advertisement for “1,000 Young and Old Singing Mockers on hand” in an 1886 issue of Harper’s Weekly.⁸ The market thrived in New York City, where dealers ran ads reading “Birds, Birds, Birds – Just Arrived From Florida, 400 young Mocking Birds,”⁹ and “Mocking Bird – For Sale, one of the greatest mocking birds in the city. He mocks cat, dog, pig, hen and rooster, and will sing night and day. He will be sold at the low price of $25.”¹⁰

While “the large number of [mockingbirds] caught makes the price reasonable enough to be within the reach of every one,”¹¹ a highly-trained mockingbird was an expensive luxury item. In an 1888 catalog of cage birds, the pets on the list commanding the highest price were “three-year-old, choice songster, finest” mockingbirds. A single bird could sell for $50 at the time, which is equivalent to around $1,600 today, a price you might expect to pay for a labradoodle puppy with a sterling pedigree.

The market didn’t stop at supplying the birds themselves. Vendors emerged to provide bird owners with a wide range of products to house and care for their pets. Cages, manuals, and medicines were available at every price point. Patent medicines like “Sheppard’s Song Restorer” promised to cure birds that had “lost their voice.”¹² Decades before cat and dog food arrived in stores, bird feed was the first commercially available pet food, “for sale by all druggists and at all bird stores.”¹³ And “Mocking-bird food,” a mix of cornmeal, pea-meal, “moss-meal,” lard, and molasses,¹⁴ was the default option for birds of many species, which manuals from the late 19th century recommended offering to catbirds, cardinals, bluebirds, and robins.¹⁵

Mockingbirds in Culture

As Alexander Wilson observed in 1810, the mockingbird is “much more numerous in those states south, than in those north, of the river Delaware.”¹⁶ And in that part of the country, the bird came to represent the entire region, where it was considered “the most wonderful song-bird of the country and the universal favorite of the people.”¹⁷ “He is a perfect Southron,” wrote one commentator in 1890, “game, irascible, saucy and daring to the extreme; but he cannot bear adversity or captivity.”¹⁸ Many Northern visitors too became “infatuated with the song of the Mocking-bird” and bought one as a pet “while on a Southern tour in winter, wishing to bring back a remembrance of the pleasant times enjoyed.”¹⁹ Five states, all southern (Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas), chose the mockingbird as their state bird.

The mockingbird was a common motif in literature, song, and poetry throughout the country, but most especially in the South. An 1895 review found 32 published poets that had composed tributes to the mockingbird, such as Walt Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and Sidney Lannier’s To Our Mocking-Bird: Died of a Cat, May, 1878. In her poem titled The South, Emma Lazarus used the mockingbird to evoke the region, writing “Within these sumptuous woods she lies at ease … And through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings.” Later poets invoked the mockingbird as well, such as Irving Berlin (“Honey, if you buy for me that mockingbird / I’ll call you names like King Louis the Third”) and Carl Sandburg (“There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird”).

Mockingbirds, of course, are not reserved for high culture. The lullaby that begins “Hush little baby, don’t say a word / Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird” originated in the South, where it was first recorded in the early 1900s. Joan Baez, Bobby McFerrin, Aretha Franklin, James Taylor, and Eminem have all sung or adapted the lullaby, while artists from Dolly Parton to Carly Simon to Phish have all mentioned mockingbirds in their music.

(It’s a Sin) to Kill a Mockingbird

Mockingbirds have always held an elevated status in the menagerie of American birds, and though they were widely caged, they were very rarely killed. Blue jays, crows, and even robins raided farmers’ crops and ruined the fruits in their orchards, and farmers as well as young boys shot the birds to their hearts’ content with no compunction. Not so with the mockingbird. In 1831, John James Audubon wrote that “Children seldom destroy the nests of these birds, and the planters generally protect them. So much does this feeling prevail throughout Louisiana, that they will not willingly permit a Mocking Bird to be shot at any time.”²⁰ People believed that mockingbirds brought only music and song and did not harm crops, which gave them a reputation for purity and innocence. This sentiment lasted well into the 20th century. “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em,” wrote Harper Lee in her 1960 novel, “but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 

Yet this protected status did not keep the birds from disappearing from the wild. In 1810 Alexander Wilson wrote that the trapping and nest-raiding driven by the high demand for caged mockingbirds made them disappear from the fields and forests around big cities. The birds had become “extremely scarce for an extent of several miles” around Philadelphia, although they were still abundant 30 miles away around Wilmington and Newcastle, from whence they were brought to Philadelphia markets.²¹ “Mockingbirds’ nests have been robbed for so many generations to furnish caged fledglings for both American and European bird dealers,” reflected one author, “that shot guns could have done no work more deadly.”²²

As mockingbirds vanished from the wild, the people who loved them grew concerned about the fate of the “Southland’s sacred songsters.”²³ In 1873, for example, a group petitioned the legislature of Georgia to ban the market for mockingbirds because so many of them had been captured and sold that they were growing scarce in the state.²⁴ A growing number of Americans also felt that caging birds was inherently cruel. Poetry was the home of much of this criticism, where writers lamented that caged birds’ song could bring no true pleasure, since birds naturally longed for the freedom of the skies. Not all birds were deserving of this sympathy, as few tears were shed for pigeons or blackbirds slaughtered by the thousands.²⁵

By 1900, most states had passed laws making it a crime to shoot mockingbirds along with other song birds, and many states had also outlawed raiding their nests for eggs or chicks. In 1907, Neltje Blanchan could write with satisfaction that “in the North you very rarely see one now-a-days behind prison bars, for, happily, several enlightened states have made laws to punish people who keep our wild birds in cages or offer them for sale, dead or alive.”²⁶ With the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, the birds came under complete Federal protection.

Mockingbirds, North

Over the last 200 years, mockingbirds have progressively expanded their range northward, taking advantage of the changes that humans were making to the environment. Their preference for “open habitats with scattered shrubs and small trees”²⁷ made them perfectly suited to the urban parks and suburban yards that have proliferated everywhere humans have settled. Today, Northern Mockingbirds are more widespread than they’ve ever been, but paradoxically, they have only become less familiar.

Every work of literature that invoked the mockingbird both drew upon and reinforced the birds’ mythology. Sometimes these works led to greater familiarity with mockingbirds in their own right. But perhaps more often, it distanced the mockingbird as a symbol from the mockingbird of flesh and feathers. Many today are doubtlessly as familiar with the mockingbird as they are with the English nightingale, which is to say, they’ve heard it referenced as a beautiful singer but would not recognize the bird or its famous song. 

I am, of course, immensely grateful that mockingbirds are now federally protected and cannot be legally kept in cages. Birds belong in the wild. But I can’t help but wonder whether, in protecting mockingbirds, we have made them entirely abstract, and have forgotten why they were so admired in the first place. They are symbols that we can invoke in songs and literature, they are icons of many of our states. But do we still celebrate the actual song, and the bird that sings it?

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1. Wilson, Alexander. American Ornithology: Or The Natural History of Birds of the United States. Volume II. United States: Porter & Coates, 1810. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Lawson, John. A new voyage to Carolina: containing the exact description and natural history of that country ; together with the present state thereof ; and a journal of a thousand miles, travel’d thro’ several nations of Indians ; giving a particular account of their customs, manners, etc. [London: s.n. Printed in the year, 1709]  ↩︎
4. Thompson, Maurice. “In the Haunts of the Mocking-Bird.” The Atlantic, November 1884. ↩︎
5. Smith, Margaret (Bayard) 1778-1844, and Gaillard Hunt. The First Forty Years of Washington Society: Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard) From the Collection of Her Grandson, J. Henley Smith. New York: Scribner, 1906. ↩︎
6. Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds …. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888, p. 161. ↩︎
7. “The Mocking Bird.” The Fanciers’ Journal: Devoted to Dogs, Poultry, Pigeons & Pet Stock. United States: Fanciers’ Publishing Company, vo. 5, no. 11, p. 173. 1890. ↩︎
8. Harper’s Weekly. Advertisement. Vol. 30, August 21, 1886, pg. 544. ↩︎
9. New York Herald, 1868. Library of Congress. ↩︎
10. New York Herald, 1855. Library of Congress. ↩︎
11. Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds …. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888, p. 161. ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Cutler, Harry Gardner. Cutler’s Red Book of Priceless Recipes: A Collection of the Most Practical, Useful and Valuable Recipes, Formulas and Suggestions for Every Occasion. United States: W.R. Vansant, 1903, p. 548. ↩︎
15. Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds …. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888. ↩︎
16. Wilson, Alexander. American Ornithology: Or The Natural History of Birds of the United States. Volume II. United States: Porter & Coates, 1810. ↩︎
17. Pearson, T. Gilbert. “The Mockingbird.” The National Association of Audubon Societies, Educational Leaflet No. 41. United States: National Audubon Society, December 1, 1909, p. 274. ↩︎
18. “The Mocking Bird.” The Fanciers’ Journal: Devoted to Dogs, Poultry, Pigeons & Pet Stock. United States: Fanciers’ Publishing Company, vo. 5, no. 11, p. 173. 1890. ↩︎
19. Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds …. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888, p. 162. ↩︎
20. Audubon, John James, and William MacGillivray. Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1831. ↩︎
21. Wilson, Alexander. American Ornithology: Or The Natural History of Birds of the United States. Volume II. United States: Porter & Coates, 1810. ↩︎
22. Blanchan, Neltje. Birds Every Child Should Know. United States: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907, p. 47-49. ↩︎
23. Biennial Report, Department of Game and Fish of the State of Alabama. 1908, p. 21. ↩︎
24. Martinsburg Weekly Independent. February 14, 1874, Page 4. Martinsburg, West Virginia. Library of Congress. ↩︎
25. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 1991. ↩︎
26. Blanchan, Neltje. Birds Every Child Should Know. United States: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907, p. 47-49. ↩︎
27. Farnsworth, G., G. A. Londono, J. U. Martin, K. C. Derrickson, and R. Breitwisch (2020). Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. ↩︎

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