Wild in the City: New Harper Lee book inspires hunt for mockingbird - Toronto Star

Wild in the City: New Harper Lee book inspires hunt for mockingbird - Toronto Star

What is it about the mockingbird that made American author Harper Lee use it as the central metaphor in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird?

It certainly wasn’t the bird’s plumage. In an avian beauty pageant, the northern mockingbird would be unlikely to win the crown on looks alone. But in the talent competition? It would take the sash for its incomparable singing.

More than 100 years ago, American conservationist T. Gilbert Pearson dubbed the northern mockingbird “the song-king of the lawn.” In 1929, noted New England ornithologist E. H. Forbush wrote that it “equals and even excels the whole feathered choir.”

The mockingbird did not earn these encomiums by being an original tunesmith. On the contrary, this predominantly grey, robin-sized member of the Mimidae family (the mimics) has a stunningly large repertoire of songs copied from others, making it more cover band than composer. 

Its scientific name, Mimus polyglottos, or “many-tongued mimic,” alludes to this. Not only can this bird perfectly copy the vocal output of any bird you can think of, it can mimic the sounds made by humans, their pets and even their various machines. Dog barking? Cat meowing? Car alarm? Electric saw? No problem. It can even exactly copy the gently sibilant sound of a mourning dove taking flight.

The repertoire of a mature male mocker can include up to 200 completely different tunes. He hurries through his song list, repeating each tune anywhere from two to six times before taking the slightest pause and racing on to the next.

The stellar mimic has long been thought of as a bird of the south, in part, perhaps, because To Kill aMockingbird is set in Alabama. But over the past century the bird’s range has been steadily expanding north and east, larg ely due to urbanization. As forests and meadows have been cleared for cities, there has been an increase in the type of edge habitat these omnivores prefer. Now there are about 400 pairs in the GTA, according to the most recent figures I could find.  

It was about 10 years ago that I saw my first mocker. It was singing its heart out on a lamppost in my local park. When it dropped down to the grass to forage, I managed to get one or two photos as it hopped around the lawn. Another time, I heard (and then had to really look for) a mockingbird devouring bright red berries in a hedge at Bluffer’s Park. The picture I took on that occasion is more bramble than bird.

Since that time, I’ve come across only a few mockingbirds in the GTA. Unhelpfully, they were all sitting atop very high perches, well out of camera range.  

Then this year, the literary universe was aflutter with the news that author Lee was set to publish her second novel, Go Set a Watchman< /i>, after a silence of 55 years.

The new book, said to be a sequel of sorts to Mockingbird, is set to come out this week. In a moment, my interest in her earlier novel â€" and the bird itself â€" was rekindled.

I set out to bag a better photo.

My mission turned out to be much harder than I had expected.

From the west side of the city to the east, I searched for my subject in all the spots I had seen it before. With zero success, I went further, clocking the kilometres as I scoped out soccer pitches, parks and parking lots â€"the type of open grassy areas mockers prefer.

When I came up empty, I put the word out for help, asking naturalists I know for tips. Where might I find a mockingbird in the GTA?

Miles Hearn, a Toronto-based naturalist who could hear â€" and identify â€" the peep of a baby bird at the bottom of a coal mine, was particularly helpful. He told me where he had seen these birds on his many spring walks and prov ided good directions.

Even assiduously following Hearn’s directions, I failed to hear or see a single one.

I’m not disheartened, though. One of these days, I hope to hear the mockingbird’s bubbling waterfall of song bursting forth in one of our local parks, and I’ll be reminded of one of Mockingbird’s most famous passages.

It occurs when Scout Finch, the novel’s young protagonist, asks her neighbour why her father, Atticus â€" a lawyer who is defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman â€" says it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

The neighbour, Miss Maudie, answers with words that hint at the beloved book’s themes of racism, innocence and xenophobia: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

mbream@t hestar.ca

Wild in the City: New Harper Lee book inspires hunt for mockingbird - Toronto Star
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