“At Last, A Mockingbird”

Out To Pastoral

by John Idol

HILLSBOROUGH, NC—(Weekly Hubris)—6/14/10—My morning walk in Clemson, South Carolina, led through a shopping center’s parking lot. Time and again, my stroll came to a pause while I listened to a mockingbird, perched atop a utility pole at one entrance, run through portions of her/his repertoire. If ever I’m to experience part of the rapture that my evangelical friends expect, I feel certain I garnered more than my fair share of it during those early morning serenades. What wondrous music! What talent! What virtuosity! I tried to repay my debt with a crude song of my own.

My move to a heavily wooded lot in Hillsborough found me in the company of many birds, not one of them a mockingbird. Cardinals, yellow and purple finches, chickadees, titmice, sparrows, juncos, doves, crows, nuthatches, woodpeckers, blue jays, blue birds,  cowbirds,  grackles, rufous-sided towhees, robins, rose-breasted grosbeaks, hummingbirds, brown thrashers, warblers, wrens, and wood thrushes visited frequently or built nests and lived well on insects, worms, or birdseed.

Deeper into the woods behind my house an owl called out to me in the early evening. Still deeper, a red-tailed hawk nested but claimed as hunting ground all of my lot and those of my neighbors as well. He often perched in a tree near where I spread seed for ground-feeding birds, awaiting a moment of carelessness from some bird and then swooping down to ensnare his prey.

One morning, as I watched him waiting for a meal, two crows came to pluck up grains of corn I had spread. They suddenly stopped feeding and moved in close together, mumbling in some language they seemed to understand well. After a brief conversation, one of them flew noisily away, keeping close to the ground. No sooner was the first crow airborne than the hawk went for him, screeching as it closed in. The hawk had not thought through the tactical side of his mission, however, forgetting, obviously, the second crow. It, too, took wing and rammed into the hawk’s tail just as it spread its talons to capture the first crow. The hawk screeched loudly again and flapped off towards the deeper woods. The crows hastily retreated, possibly to brag about their tactical superiority.

A one-time visitor to my yard was a red-shouldered hawk, a magnificent bird with some translucent patches in its plumage. It lingered in the yard for several minutes, watching what I could not tell: mouse, bird, snake, frog, or squirrel. Had he been after a squirrel, of which I host far too many, I would have gladly scouted for him. Brilliant he was beneath a late April sun, wearing his plumage like a sun god. A handsome dude, indeed.

Another visitor decked in brilliant array surprised me one day, for I had never seen an indigo bunting in the Piedmont  of  either South or North Carolina. This luminous bird likes the Blue Ridge Mountains, appearing often alongside roads and cart-ways. Its plumage practically dazzles the eye when the sun falls full upon it. It often fed alongside another bird, a Carolina grosbeak, with a colorful coat, a kind of dusty blue. Although bird guide books list it among birds found throughout the Tar Heel state, I’d never seen one in the Blue Ridge.

If these birds matched in song the brilliance of their array, I never heard, for they fed hungrily and remained silent. Yet, my backyard  did have a surprise songster, a Carolina wren, drab of color, perky of tail, and full of melodic warbles. Since wrens seemingly want to make human houses  their own, they linger nearby and take advantage of nesting places, often in potted plants. For two years straight, a couple of them took refuge from wintry winds by squeezing into the Christmas wreath on our front door. When I opened the door, they flitted into the house, banging against walls, too frightened to be scooped up and released, escaping into the blackness of night only after I opened windows, removed screens, and coaxed them to enter a flight plan that wouldn’t carry them towards the ceiling again.

Despite the fact that my bulk must have loomed as large as a blue whale’s would to me, they hung around to sing the next day when I returned to the backyard.

Gifted as they were, they were not a replacement for a mockingbird.

To hear one sing, I had to cross New Sharon Church Road on my

morning walk and head down a country lane named Watkin’s Farm Road, with its rows of Bradford pears on either side. Here, or atop one of a string of Leyland cypresses bordering New Sharon Church Road, I heard a mockingbird revel in its repertoire, wishing as I listened that it or a mate would cross the street and visit the more heavily wooded stretch along my street, Krystle Court.

Has a mockingbird a dislike of dense woodland, I wondered. The flight across New Sharon would simply be a matter of 60 feet or so. A strategy I’d used in my boyhood days to coax bob whites to come closer by mocking their calls failed, no doubt because my feeble attempts at mocking must have seemed hilarious to the Watkin’s Farm diva. I whistled in vain, year after year, improving not in the least meanwhile. I began to think that some benign spirit insisted on posting mockingbirds along Watkin’s Farm Road to make certain I covered the full route of my morning walk.

Perhaps it was the same benign force that, taking note of my temporary inability to cross New Sharon and head down Watkin’s Farm, convinced a mockingbird to come to my neighborhood, or, perhaps, a timbering crew that whacked down scores of trees just back of me opened up a space big enough for a mockingbird’s feeding ground led to its coming. Gladly, I can now report, I today host, at last, a mockingbird.