“I simulated a six-month invasion of eight new species and none of their songs were picked up by the mockingbirds,” Gammon said. Gammon combed through hours of recordings from 15 adult banded mockingbirds from that year and several years afterward and found not a single imitation of any of the new songs. In fact, they didn’t imitate any of the songs. They Had Feathers: Is the World Ready to See Dinosaurs as They Really Were? The Mourning Dove is too low and slow, and the Chipping Sparrow is too high and fast.

“When a Tufted Titmouse sings, it already sounds similar to something a mockingbird would sing,” Gammon said.

He tested several hypotheses and found that mockingbirds mimic birds whose songs are similar in pitch and rhythm to their own vocalizations. Never-mimicked species included the Mourning Dove and Chipping Sparrow. Gammon analyzed his recordings of campus mockingbirds and found that they most often mimicked the Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, Blue Jay, Northern Cardinal, and Eastern Bluebird. One of the first questions he tackled was why mockingbirds mimic some species but not others. “Studying mimicry was a natural fit,” he said.

He’s always enjoyed imitating other people’s voices and mannerisms. As a biologist, he was drawn to bird song because he had a good ear (he minored in music in college) and liked being outdoors. Gammon began studying mockingbirds in 2006 after joining the biology department at Elon University in central North Carolina. However, Gammon’s research has cast doubt on this long-held assumption about mockingbirds, surprising even himself. Parrots and European Starlings are examples of open-ended learners. A typical song is about equally divided between mimicked phrases and mockingbird-specific vocalizations.Īlthough most bird species only learn songs during a critical period in their youth, mockingbirds have long been considered open-ended learners-meaning that they learn new songs throughout their adulthood. A male may have several hundred phrases in his repertoire, although some will be in much heavier rotation than others. Mockingbirds string together series of repeated phrases, some of which are imitations of other bird species. Their singing is not only voluminous but also diverse. Both females and males sing, and they can be heard any month of the year and any time of the day-and even at night.

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