CHAPTER ONE
Four Hundred Tongues
Mockingbirds and Native Americans
[We] send greetings and thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people … We are glad they are still here and we hope that it will always be so.
—Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address
When Spanish explorers arrived in North America and claimed what they called the “New World,” millions of Indigenous people were already living there. They were scattered in nations and bands and tribes throughout the chain of continents and islands that stretches from Alaska to Chile. Mockingbirds could be heard throughout much of that territory.
The mockingbird’s song captured the attention and respect of Indigenous Americans, and plays a central role in many Native American myths and legends that explain how life began or, especially, how languages developed. A few examples:
Cherokees called the mocker Cencontlatolly, which translates to “four hundred tongues.” They fed their children mockingbird heads to increase their intelligence.
In Shasta Indian mythology, the mockingbird watches over the dead. To the Maricopa, one who dreams of a mockingbird is endowed with special powers. The mockingbird is a wise mediator who settles disputes in O’odham folklore.
In the creation stories of the Hopi and other Pueblo tribes, it was Mockingbird—the most gifted of all linguists—who taught the people to speak. Mockingbirds could even pass messages between people and gods.
In the Pueblo story, animals and Pueblo people initially lived together underground. Both groups sought to rise to live aboveground, but they didn’t know the way. Badger and Shrike—a songbird—were advance scouts who finally found the way out. They received a welcoming promise of land for the Pueblo people. Five days later, the first Pueblos emerged from the lower world through the mouth of a cave. As they did, Mockingbird, sitting just outside the cave entrance, gave them each a language.
A story from Mayan culture explains how the mockingbird became the best singer. It is the story of X-chol-col-chek, a young female mockingbird who agrees to use her great singing talent to help a friend. The friend, a young female cardinal, has been ordered by her father to sing to the entire community. But the cardinal is terrified because she knows she is a poor singer. She talks her mockingbird friend into hiding inside a hollow tree and singing in her place.
But just before the concert the cardinal father finds out about the switch. Instead of punishing his daughter, he invites X-chol-col-chek to come out from her hiding place and sing for the crowd. The small, gray bird trembles with fright at first, but then gains confidence as the audience responds to her brilliant performance. Wings flap in wild applause. She takes many bows. From that time on, all her mockingbird descendants inherit her lovely voice. That is how the mockingbird became the best singer. But, goes the story, cardinals never have learned to sing very well.
Another Hopi story offers a very different explanation for how Mockingbird gave their people many languages. This happened at a time when heavy rain and punishing winds sent water rising over riverbanks and drove the people from their homes. The downpour showed no sign of stopping. Stranded people began to carp at one another. The chief worried that some people were secretly forming plans to return to their flooded homeland despite the danger.
He called a council and asked his wisest leaders what could be done to preserve the peace. One counselor suggested there were too many people who spoke the same language. It was too easy for them to plot and scheme. Why not split the tongues?
“How could we do this?” the chief asked.
“Well,” he replied, “don’t we have Mockingbird, who knows many songs? Why shouldn’t he give us many different languages?”
The great vocalist sang from inside a tree to help a friend. (Shutterstock)
The chief was intrigued. It seemed worth a try. They prepared an offering for Mockingbird and set it out. They started singing Mockingbird’s calling songs and, after four songs, a slim, gray, long-legged bird with its tail held high fluttered down before them. The chief stated his request, and Mockingbird said yes, he could scramble the language. It would be done by the following morning. The bird asked the chief if he would like to speak a different language, but the chief said he would rather keep his own.
When the people awoke the next morning, they couldn’t understand one another. Baffled and upset, they went to the chief, but they couldn’t understand him either. The mockingbird, adept at languages, had to interpret. And still does.
As time has passed, new mockingbird tales have arisen. A story told by Mexican-American folklorist Jovita González explains why the mockingbird has a white stripe on each wing: At one time, all animals spoke the same language. Mockingbird became so convinced that his sound was the best of all that he became conceited. He boasted to his wife that the next day he would perform a concert to the flowers and cause them to dance. “Con el favor de Dios,” his wife said: “If God wills it.”
The next day, as Mockingbird cleared his throat to sing from the top of a sweet acacia tree, he was snatched away by a hawk. As he was carried up high in the air, he realized his vanity. He repented. “O God, it is you who make the flowers bloom and the birds sing, not I.” The hawk released him and he fell to the ground, landing heavily. He was comforted by a white dove who had a nest nearby. “My wings!” said the mockingbird. “How tattered and torn they look!” The white dove, taking pity on him, plucked three feathers from her own white wings to repair the mockingbird’s torn wings. And to this day, the mockingbird bears the dove’s bright stripe on each wing as a reminder not to be so proud.
The mockingbird flashes the white feathered stripes on its wings. (Ruth Hoyt)
For many years, these and countless other stories and songs have become polished like smooth stones in the telling and retelling. And Mockingbird, that brilliant communicator who speaks in four hundred tongues and shuttles messages to and from the gods, has often been a leading character.
CHAPTER TWO
Settlers, Explorers, and Mock-Birds
1492 to 1750
He imitateth … at all hours in the night.
—Thomas Glover, An Account of Virginia
Christopher Columbus captained three wooden ships across the Atlantic Ocean, from Spain to an island in the Caribbean Sea, arriving in October of 1492. The Spaniards thought they had discovered a back route to India, but it didn’t look or sound as they had expected. For the next five months, they explored the land and waters of the warm Caribbean, particularly the islands of Juana (now known as Cuba) and Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Ever on guard for an ambush, the Spanish sailors clanked through the blazing heat in heavy armor.
Columbus kept a journal intended to impress the Spanish royals, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who had paid for most of the voyage. He would present the journal to them when he returned to Spain. He lavishly described the newly discovered “India” as a “cornucopia,” or as Belgian artist Ana Torfs interpreted his writings, a “paradise of wondrous flowers, with a thousand variety of trees and remarkable fruits, not to mention astonishing fish and birds of the most dazzling colors.”
Again and again, Columbus reported the presence of the nightingale, the small bird whose complex and beautiful song made it the poetic soul of Europe, and one of the queen’s favorite songbirds. Early in the visit, Columbus wrote that he “went a short distance into that country … and heard sing the nightingale and other songbirds like those of Castile [Spain].” Months later he repeated, “The nightingale and other small birds of a thousand kinds were singing in the month of November when I was there.”
But the birds the Spanish explorers heard were not nightingales. There were no nightingales in “the New World.” The nearest nightingales were back in Europe, an ocean behind them. Columbus’s crew members were probably hearing northern mockingbirds. As Cuban biologist Carlos Peña says, “I suspect [Columbus] was referring to the northern mockingbird, because it is abundant in different environments in Cuba and because it sings loudly from exposed perches.” Maybe Columbus assumed that only a nightingale could sing such a spectacular song, or maybe he was just inventing the sightings to please Her Majesty. The two birds do not look much alike—the mockingbird is slender and gray, and the nightingale compact and brown.
Ana Torfs has studied Columbus’s journal in detail. She found that nightingale was one of the words he used the most, along with sign, gold, tree, cross, believe, trade, parrot, danger, wonder, and weapon. Her conclusion: “When we bump up against the limits of our imagination and knowledge, reflections of what we already know become the blueprint for new descriptions and definitions.” In other words, the nightingale should be there, it must be there, so Columbus puts it there. Torfs saw Columbus as one who looked but didn’t see, or saw only what he wanted to.
* * *
In the century that followed, more and more Spanish adventurers explored Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, establishing settlements and missions.
England defeated the Spanish navy in 1588, clearing the way for British exploration and settlement in the New World. Settlers and mockers became a duet—a musical partnership—adding to the songs and chants created long before by Native Americans. In 1705, historian Robert Beverley sized up the musical bond between mockingbirds and colonists: “Mock-birds … love Society so well, that whenever they see Mankind, they will perch upon a Twigg very near them, and sing the sweetest wild Airs in the World: But what is most remarkable in these Melodious Animals, they will frequently fly at small distances before a Traveller, warbling out their Notes several Miles an end, and by their Musick make a Man forget the Fatigues of his Journey.”
(Alamy)
Not everyone was charmed. Early explorers complained in their journals of the mocker’s annoying ability to sing through the night and keep them awake. In 1676, Thomas Glover, perhaps rubbing his eyes as he wrote, complained about the mockingbird in his Account of Virginia: “He imitateth all the birds in the woods … he singeth not only in the day, but also at all hours in the night.”
Mark Catesby’s “Mock-Bird”
Mark Catesby gave many birds their first English-language names. He tended to use multiword descriptive names, such as “blew grosbeak,” “yellow-breasted chat,” and “painted finch.” The “mock-bird,” as Catesby called the mocker, was later named by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 tenth edition of Systema Naturae—a framework for classifying and naming all plants and animals in the world—Turdus polyglottos.
Two of America’s earliest and most important explorers were surveyor John Lawson and naturalist and artist Mark Catesby. Setting out in 1700, Lawson explored by canoe the barrier islands off the South Carolina coast and then hiked to the mountaintops of North Carolina. He described the plants, animals, and Indigenous people he encountered in a book titled A New Voyage to Carolina. Lawson wrote that mockers “are held to be Choristers of America, as indeed they are. They sing with the greatest Diversity of Notes, that is possible for a Bird to change to.”
In 1712, Mark Catesby journeyed from England to America to paint and study the life forms present in the New World. He hired Native Americans to guide him through lands that had not been explored by Europeans. Catesby produced the first book describing the plants and animals of what is now the southeastern United States. The book included paintings of 220 species, including the songster he called the “mock-bird.”
Catesby’s portrait of the “mock-bird” (Alamy)
As the land began to fill with settlers and enslaved people kidnapped from Africa to perform backbreaking labor, the mockingbird didn’t retreat into the wilderness. Instead, if anything, the bond with humans became tighter. Mockers nested in the shadows of crude cabins and great plantation mansions alike. They sang from rail fences and farm hedges and chimney tops. They built their nests in shrubs and flitted among the bearded limbs of moss-covered oak trees. In the Southwest, they nested in prickly cacti and dined on pale green sage plants.
They would devour just about anything, including quantities of worms, beetles, grubs, moths, caterpillars, and grasshoppers, feeding both on the ground and in trees. When fruits ripened, they took their full share, eating figs, grapes, strawberries, blackberries, dewberries, prickly pears, mulberries, and a far larger range of soft fruits and berries. Poison ivy berries—rich in fat and protein—were a special mockingbird treat. They were even observed drinking the sap from cuts on recently pruned or injured trees.
Mockingbirds were opportunists, birds that took chances, birds that weren’t afraid of anyone or anything. Frontier children gathered to watch mockers turn somersaults in the air on moonlit nights.
At the heart of the mocker-human partnership, the duet, was an unspoken tradeoff: food for entertainment. Settlers planted fruit trees and berry bushes. The mockers gobbled down the food on the spot or carried it off to feed gape-mouthed nestlings.
In the years before radios and recorded songs, and before telephone wires crisscrossed the sky, America was a singing country. Many people could play instruments. Native Americans accompanied songs and chants with flutes and drums. Around the fire, pioneer families played fiddles, banjos, and harmonicas.
And the mocker took it all in, threw back its head, and claimed its place in the choir.
Working as a Family
When the female mocker chooses a mate, the couple works together to build a nest, usually in a hedge or a bush a few feet off the ground. The male does most of the construction work while the female keeps watch for predators. The female lays an average of four brown-splotched blue eggs, which hatch in about two weeks. Nestlings are born blind, helpless, and fuzz-coated. The nestlings must be fed by their parents for their first two weeks. Mockingbirds are famously attentive parents, attacking cats, dogs, and even humans that stray too close to their nests.
(Alamy)
(Alamy)
CHAPTER THREE
“Dick Sings”
Thomas Jefferson and the First White House Pet, 1803
A superior being in the form of a bird.
—Thomas Jefferson
As of this writing, a total of nineteen US presidents have kept birds as pets. But the first pet ever to live in the White House was a sweet-singing and very smart northern mockingbird named Dick, who joined President Thomas Jefferson in the White House in 1803. The mocker was the president’s pride and joy.
Jefferson had long admired mockingbirds. He bought his first mocker for five shillings in 1772 from an enslaved person owned by Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles. In those days, mockingbirds were captured and sold widely as pets. They sang from their cages and could be trained to imitate all sorts of sounds, including songs, musical instruments, and the squawks, whinnies, brays, quacks, and growls of farm animals. Some purchasers would only buy “singing” mockingbirds—birds caught and taught to sing a few songs before they were offered for sale. Other owners preferred to let the birds imitate the sounds they heard around their cages.
Jefferson bought another mocker the following year. As much as he enjoyed his new pets, Jefferson worried that mockers were becoming scarce. So many nestlings had been trapped along the tidal rivers of eastern Virginia and sold in city markets that Jefferson wondered if any free mockingbirds would ever reach Monticello, his hilltop home in central Virginia. He knew that mockingbirds followed humans, and human settlement had not yet reached Monticello. But Jefferson wondered if there would be wild mockers left by the time the land around Monticello was cleared for farms and fields.
But in 1793, Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Randolph heard a mocker’s unmistakable song spilling from the branches of a cedar tree at Monticello. Randolph immediately wrote to Jefferson, who was then living in Philadelphia. Jefferson, widely regarded as one of Virginia’s leading bird experts, replied at once to his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph. He made no effort to conceal his excitement: “I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mocking-bird,” he wrote. He also issued a warning: “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs.”
* * *
Thomas Jefferson became the third US president on March 4, 1801. He reluctantly moved into a White House still under construction. At the time it was the largest residential house in America. Jefferson found it a dusty and depressing collection of empty rooms. He suffered from back pains and headaches. Financial woes and a sense of personal loss deepened Jefferson’s gloom. His wife, Martha, had died years before, and now he was separated from his beloved grandchildren. He was living in the White House with his aide Meriwether Lewis.
Presidential Birds
Copyright © 2022 by Phillip Hoose
