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Harper Lee famously wrote that it’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird.  Because they don’t do nothing but sing for us all day long, she said.  With all due respect to Ms Lee’s prodigious literary talent, she’s never had to deal with the Northern Mockingbirds in my neighborhood.  Not that I would ever go so [...]

Here in the southeast we have three Mimids of three distinct groups all present more or less throughout the year.  The Northern Mockingbird is easily the most famous, celebrated in classic literature and song and deemed notable enough to have the honor of being the official state bird of five southern states.  Brown Thrashers, those [...]

On a recent visit to Wave Hill, a public garden in the Bronx, I was amazed by how confiding the resident Northern Mockingbirds were.  In addition to watching them forage and sing I also chanced upon a rather violent encounter between two mockingbirds.  One came out the fight clearly victorious as the other turned tail [...]

As I have probably already mentioned, I was in southern California over the holidays.  Before I headed out there from my home in New York I was monitoring the local listservs in California for birds I had never seen in the hopes of adding some birds to my life list during my time in the [...]

Pity the poor mockingbird.  They are despised for singing all night, chided for being a bully at the feeders, and killed in the title of a famous novel.  Surely no bird deserves such persecution?  Sadly, the list of injustices that mockingbirds have to suffer through has a new addition: the mange.  Poor, poor, mangy mockingbird. [...]

When leaving the East Pond of Jamaica Bay on Saturday we came across this sunning Gray Catbird.  At first glance we thought it was dead, but it quickly became obvious it was just letting the cat part of its nature take over and just lazily enjoying the sun, probably hoping to cook the parasites off [...]

We can start first with what catbirds are not.  Catbirds are not the unfortunate result of unwise experiments with radioactivity.  Catbirds are also not the result of unholy intercourse between avians and felines.  They are not flying cats nor birds with whiskers.  So what are catbirds? Catbirds are a group of rather distantly related species [...]

Mockingbirds are members of the Mimidae family, a group of American passerines that also includes thrashers, tremblers, and New World catbirds. These stentorian songbirds, medium sized with angular proportions and long, twitchy tails, range from the Canadian border down through South America. Northern Mockingbird by Mike, found fittingly at Hotel Mocking Bird Hill in Jamaica [...]