It probably isn't the first time we've been kept up late by a neighbor who got stood up, either... (grin)

They can be very very loud.

MKK

I realize this doesn't really match Teresa's description. But it just sounded like a New York kind of bird to me, all right.

I don't think nightingales are native to or at all common in North America, unless (as Alter suggests) it's an escapee. They aren't even listed in my Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds.

"It sounds like a mockingbird. They have individual and large repertoires.Is it repeating things around three times typically? This is a key.

Singing all night near a light during breeding season is typical mockingbird behavior. If it persists and is keeping you up at night, shoot
the bird, break the light, chop the tree down (probably wouldn't work, other perches available), or let the season pass."

So speaks The Master.

Jane

The prohibition against killing them must be profound — otherwise disturbed sleepers would have slain them all long ago.

Years ago, I was visiting D. Potter when she still lived on Broadway Terrace, in New York. The sort of car alarm that cycles through a number of different alarming sounds had just made its advent, and one of them, in fact, had made its advent on Broadway Terrace in the middle of the night, not far from D.'s ground-floor bedroom window. Ever since that night I have referred to that style of car alarm as a "Manhattan mockingbird."

As a born and bred city kid, I never used to believe that you could tell birds apart by their songs--just like I never believed it was possible to really see anything by the light of the moon, until I was sixteen and lying in a cornfield in upstate New York and noticed how bright it was. I'm just slow that way. So I'd been hearing mockingbirds gabbling around my block for years before I realized that they must be those famous mockingbirds.

I've also learned to identify mourning doves. I'm a regular nature-girl nowadays.

I play spot-the-hawk when I'm driving to Boskone. It's a good time of year for it. One year I counted eleven.

Especially interesting is the last part, that sounds just like an electrical wire on the fritz!

Jane

Do mockingbirds play telephone? How faithfully do they reproduce sounds, and do they learn sampled sounds from each other?

He also has a complete Scottish birdsong power point show.

As to mockers, why we have them up here,and certainly into Vermont/NHampshire, so NY is not their northernmost territory at all.

Jane

I remember when I was a kid in Queens (Fresh Meadows), there was a mocker that sometimes used to perch on the steeple of the church we went to. Startling and lovely to emerge from the building after Mass and find him making a joyful noise from the highest point in the vicinity.

What I want to know is, did the inventor of the car alarm get the idea from listening to mockingbirds, or did mockingbirds learn to do that from hearing car alarms?

Yes, he sings (you know it is the same wave sign as a barking dog, right?) all night long at times.

The mockingbird drove the robins away from the pyracantha I planted. He now raises a brood every year. Now the coralies are driving the mockingbirds away. Gets noisy around here at times.

Well, my mom had a recurring mockingbird visitor who liked her sweet gum tree, and one spring, after the neighbor had moved in and brought his SUV, the mockingbird started waking us up every morning, singing the same pattern, pitch, and repetition as the car alarm.

Did you know that if you slow down bird song to about a quarter, it sounds like whale song. And vice versa.

Jane

They seem to like being at high spots. They're often perched at the peak of a roof, the top of a shrub, etc. Not necessarily the highest point around, but the local maxima.
I suppose the high spots are best for looking for bugs to eat.

When I moved to Arizona, I was startled by how much smaller western mockingbirds are than eastern birds (a couple inches shorter, and more slender). But they otherwise behave the same, terrorizing cats and singing through the summer night. I use walking out the bedroom door at midnight and being able to hear that distinctive song as a rumor that summer is here. They haven't kept me awake, tho' -- Tucson is darker, streetlightingwise, than DC, and the swamp-cooler is a noisy thing.

---L.

They've been extending their range northward throughout the 20th century, with first appearances in Maine and Vancouvre being in the 1930s. Their natural habitat is forest edges, and like others who live there, adapt to urban lawns without trouble. Many insects, worms, and berries are there.

---L.

Mockingbirds can get extremely noisy, but they're quieter than woodpeckers.... thought the mockingbird by my parent's unit down in Florida, does ambulance siren imitation, at ambulance siren sound levels. (It's a gated over-50 community, and the ambulance visit there frequently....)

A short digression on Harris hawks. Southern Arizona is the northern limit of their range. They're just barely making it here. In adaptive response, here, they hunt cooperatively like wolves, in "packs" of four to six; they don't do this through most of Mexico. Only the alpha female nests, and she doesn't let the others near it. So if nest is here, the pack is over there.

So: this morning, =there= was a telephone pole a block and a half away. Three of them, one working on devowering a scrap of something furry (probably a bunny). I noticed them because of the mockingbird.

Mocker was scolding: kawk! on a rising scale, very like a jay scold. And attacking them — well, one hawk at a time, but all of them in turn — using its acrobatic flying to swoop behind and peck between the wings, hard enough to make the victim flinch. These were two-foot-long raptors and this a smaller mockingbird than what you saw, Teresa, but it was making them uncomfortable. I watched for three minutes, until the three flew somewhere else with the air of "I meant to be leaving anyway."

Mockingbird are excellent fliers. My theory is that this lets them be the most pugnacious birds around — with the exception of the only birds that fly even better: hummingbirds.

---L.

ps. Sorry, Lori, no ideas. They are under biological imperative.