Hey, That's Avian Harassment! When the Little Guys Get to Win

 Allow me a few moments to relate a story...

Those who've known me in my latter fatter days will have a hard time believing that I was once half the man I am today. I mean that literally; I was 6'2" and weighed 130 pounds. That meant that I was better adapted to competing on the cross-country team as opposed to, say, football. We did okay in those days, but the real winners among our high school teams were the water polo players. Big, heavy, but buoyant, those guys fought dirty underwater and made mincemeat of the other teams in the conference.

Somewhere along the way, someone suggested a tackle football game between the monstrous water polo players and the skinny, mostly short cross-country runners. To say we looked overmatched was an under(water)statement. But come the end of the season (when injuries wouldn't be as consequential) the game was on. If you consider that I was the main lineman and tackle, you can guess at the effectiveness of both defense and offense. It was going to be a bloodbath.

But it wasn't.

We were small, nimble, and fast. When they tried a run up the middle, we mostly got knocked over, but we got up and swarmed the ball carrier. They scored a few touchdowns. When we had the ball, we linemen got knocked over every time, but the quarterback could run fast, and so could the receivers. When the game was over, we prevailed. The little guys were victorious for once!

I remembered that game from so many years ago because of two pictures I took this week. They're grainy and out of focus, but they show hawks being harassed by much smaller birds. In the first picture, a Western Kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis) is chasing and attacking a Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) above the Tuolumne River Parkway Trail in Waterford. The other shows a Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) attacking a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensus) on the campus of CSU Stanislaus. The action is called mobbing, and the smaller birds are defending their nests from predation, or protecting their territory. The small agile birds are generally not in a great deal of danger because of their speed and mobility, not unlike a bunch of small thin cross-country runners playing football against big heavy water polo players.

Birding from 18 Inches Away: Baby Mockingbird out the Kitchen Window

 Sometimes birders will travel the lengths of the world to get close to our feathered colleagues, but sometimes they appear, well, REALLY close to home. Like outside the kitchen window. There was a commotion this morning in the front yard, a region of our neighborhood mostly given over to Northern Mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos). It appeared to involve a pair of the aforementioned Mockingbirds and a local cat (not ours, although ours was watching carefully out the window. I checked out the kitchen window and saw this very young chick perched 18 inches away outside the window, pretty much unaware of our presence. I couldn't tell it there was a problem, or if this was just the normal progression of exploring outside the nest (the adult birds have chased the cat away).

One of the Obvious Ones: The Northern Mockingbird at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

There are some birds you just can't miss. They are in your neighborhood. They're in your yard. Maybe you see them where you work, especially if you work outdoors. And if you can't see them, you probably hear them. They sing incessantly, and it doesn't matter if it's day or night. Some individuals will sing 200 different songs over the course of their lifetime. On top of everything else, they are territorial, and will be perched in obvious places, making sure they are seen. And they'll fight with other birds. There's a virtual war that takes place in my backyard between them and the Scrub Jays.

It is of course the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), a bird that is almost unique to the United States (there are quite a few in Mexico, almost none in Canada). They've been found in all the lower 48 states, and are now common in Hawaii where they are an introduced species. They've also been seen in Alaska, but only very rarely. When I walk my neighborhood, I tend to ignore them. But when I toured the Merced National Wildlife Refuge a few weeks back, this individual was there to great me at the entrance to the auto-tour, literally perching on the welcome sign. I took it as an invitation, and snapped a number of close-ups.

As common as they are, the Northern Mockingbird almost disappeared from the eastern United states because they were cherished as songbird pets. They were enshrined in literature as well, being part of story of Scout and Atticus Finch. I guess Mockingbirds were on my mind this week as yet another misguided school districted decided to remove the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" because it made people "uncomfortable". From the movie version:

Atticus Finch: I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Jem: Why?
Atticus Finch: Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.

Northern Mockingbird at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

There are birds that we see every day, and so often, that they tend to fade into the general background. If they didn't sing, that would be true of the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), but they do sing, and so it is hard to ignore them. Especially when it's three in the morning and they are outside your window. Still, they are so common in the urban environment that I rarely try to photograph them. But they are interesting and intelligent birds. I was at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge a couple of months ago and among all the rare and colorful migrant species I spotted this Mockingbird perched out in the open. I like the way the shot turned out, so here it is. It's only the second time I've posted about them!

Small Dinosaurs in the Backyard: Northern Mockingbirds Guard Their Territory

There's a saying amongst field geologists, that when you finish a field project and review your samples, you'll find you've failed to collect the single most common rock in the entire field area. I, of course, have been the same way with my bird project. I've documented all manner of birds that I've seen in my travels around California and elsewhere, and I see that I have failed to include any of the most common birds that visit my backyard. 

And so here is one of those every-day species, the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos). They make their presence known in our neighborhood day and night, with singing, of course, but also in their territorial defense. Our cat has been at war with them for a dozen years. They've fought to a draw; she's nailed one or two of the birds, but the birds keep the cat hiding in the planters during the height of the breeding season.

The Northern Mockingbird is an American species. It's northern limit coincides with the Canadian border for the most part. They also range into Mexico, but they are found in all of the lower 48 states. It was part of the title of one of our country's greatest novels (and movie), and Mockingbirds were once kept as pets in the eastern United States, almost to the point of removing them entirely from the wild.

I'm not entirely sure why, but Mockingbirds remind me of the dinosaur connection more than most birds. The birds descended from small theropod dinosaurs like the Velociraptors. As such, birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than dinosaurs are related to reptiles inhabiting our world today (the present-day snakes, lizards, turtles and alligators split from the dinosaur line in the Permian Period millions of years before the dinosaurs themselves evolved.