It's the year of the mockingbirds

Must credit The Providence Journal
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By KEN WEBER
The Providence Journal

It sounds like the title of some old song or a children's story: the mockingbirds in the honeysuckle. But these mockingbirds are real, and they have been brightening our back yard for several months now. They even hatched out a bunch of chicks.
This is the first year in a decade or more that mockingbirds have nested in the yard. Once, it was a common occurrence, but for reasons I never knew they stopped nesting here. They didn't go far -- I would often see mockers in the neighborhood, especially in winter -- but they obviously found other places more suitable for nesting.
Then they were lured back. Inadvertently.
Mockingbirds, of course, are among the most vocal of all birds. Not only do they mimic -- mock -- other birds' songs and various other sounds, but they are so irrepressible. It's almost as if they cannot resist singing and whistling through early spring, sometimes beginning well before dawn. That habit doesn't endear them to everybody, but few people really resent these birds. They possess a spirit, an attitude easily likened to cheerfulness, that compensates for any faults.
Mockingbirds even whistle in winter, often on the coldest days when other birds seem interested only in eating. Experts say mockingbirds' winter whistling is a means of establishing feeding territories and defending food sources but, to me, the calls always seemed more of a jeer, a taunt to other birds that seek human handouts. I know it was winter when I first began admiring mockingbirds, not only for their exuberance but for something else that I called independence.
We feed birds in winter, but mockingbirds always ignored our goodies. Until this year. While jays and juncos and chickadees and cardinals swarmed around the sunflower seeds, the mockingbirds remained in the bushes behind the garden. When goldfinches hung on the thistle-seed bags, the mockers kept their distance. When nuthatches and woodpeckers came out of the woods to the suet cakes, the mockingbirds all but laughed at them.
That self-sufficiency impressed me. Mockingbirds could get along just fine without us, as long as the supply of seeds and shriveled berries on the wild bushes held out. When I mentioned to birding friends that mockers did not come to our feeders, several suggested that the birds could be "enticed" with pieces of fruit. Perhaps. But why would I want to deliberately rob these birds of their independence when they really didn't need my help?
One mockingbird changed that. Late this past winter, a mockingbird tasted the suet -- I don't know why, after all these years -- and soon became addicted. It would cling to the wire cage and chip off fat, piece after piece. It drove away downy woodpeckers and nuthatches, and competed with a gang of starlings for space on the cage.
For more than a month, there was just that one mockingbird stuffing itself with suet. Then, spring came, and mating season. That's when a second mocker appeared. I'm fairly certain the addicted mocker was a male, since males do most of the spring singing, and our mocker sang whenever it wasn't eating. That bird introduced its new mate to the free food and before long both were helping themselves.
I certainly didn't intend to get mockingbirds hooked on suet, but my disappointment over this turn of events was brief. About the time we stopped our bird-feeding (except for the hummingbirds' sugar water), we noticed the mockingbirds going into and out of a dense tangle of honeysuckle vines that have engulfed an old clothesline post. Sure enough, the mockers had a nest deep inside that tangle.
It seemed a pretty good spot for a nest, but we weren't confident the eggs and chicks would survive, mainly because of squirrels. Each year, doves nest in our spruces, robins and cardinals nest in shrubs, song sparrows and Carolina wrens nest in low bushes, and invariably several nests are destroyed by squirrels. By stopping the bird-feeding in mid-spring, we cut down on the number of squirrels visiting the yard, but there usually are a few raiders, including our resident red squirrel.
The mockers, like the other birds, can't always defend their eggs and chicks, but they don't take kindly to intruders. They fussed whenever we came close to the honeysuckle during incubation time and they chased other wild creatures. I never saw them interact with the red squirrel, but for some reason the mockers took a particular dislike to catbirds, often running them completely out of the yard.
About the time the mockingbird eggs hatched, the honeysuckle began blooming. That made for an aromatic nursery indeed. Now, the young mockers are out of the nest and following their parents around, begging for food, just like the young robins and young cardinals and young song sparrows. By the way, this year the song sparrows hatched only their own eggs; there are no hulking cowbird chicks demanding food from female song sparrows. I know it's "natural" for female cowbirds to lay eggs in other birds' nests but I never liked seeing small birds forced to serve as cowbird chicks' foster parents, often at the expense of their own chicks.
Mostly, though, this has been the year of the mockingbirds. It's good to have them here again, even if it took a suet addiction to bring them back.

(Ken Weber writes books on nature and outdoor recreation. Contact him at kweber(at)projo.com.)

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