Mockingbird
| Mockingbird | ||||||||||||
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Mockingbird ( Mimus polyglottos ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Mimus polyglottos | ||||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
The mockingbird ( Mimus polyglottos ) is a North American songbird .
features
The 25 cm long mockingbird has a gray back, darker wings with white wing stripes and a long black tail with white outer feathers. The slender black beak is slightly curved downwards.
Occurrence
The distribution area extends from southern Canada over the USA to Mexico and the Caribbean ; however, the bird is most common in the Florida to Texas area . The mockingbird lives in different habitats, such as open grass areas, semi-deserts, forest regions, fields and populated areas.
behavior
The long, complex and loud song of the mockingbird, which also imitates the calls and sounds of other animals and environmental noises, can be heard throughout the day and into the night. The male's vocal repertoire consists of 50 to 200 songs.
With its long legs, it searches the ground for food, which includes invertebrates , seeds and other fruits. When foraging for food, the bird often spreads its wings and shows the white wing spots. This behavior is used either to defend the territory or to startle prey.
The bird is considered fearless and aggressive. He vehemently defends breeding and winter areas. Sometimes the mockingbird calls in other species to help with a special call in order to drive away larger predators together.
Reproduction
The mockingbird builds a bowl-shaped nest of twigs on a low branch in the dense bushes in an open landscape. Two to six eggs are incubated by the female alone for 12 to 13 days. The young birds fledge at nine to twelve days.
Others
The Mockingbird is the state bird of Arkansas , Florida, Mississippi , Tennessee and Texas. It is particularly typical of the southern states of the USA and appears in the title of Harper Lee's southern bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird , which appeared in German under the adaptively translated title Who disturbs the nightingale . In Ambrose Bierce's prose collection In the Middle of Life We Are Surrounded by Death (English Tales of Soldiers and Civilians ), the author in the story Die Mockingbird uses the bird as a cynical connecting element between the twins Grayrock - a southern and a northern national.
In the first verse of the lullaby Hush little Baby , the baby is promised a mockingbird. The melody was used as a sample by Eminem and he named the song Mockingbird after the bird. There is also a corresponding title from Rob Thomas , Barclay James Harvest and from Carly Simon , James Taylor and Tom Waits .
The world's first sound card from 1983 was called the Mockingboard .
The mockingbird must not be confused with the mocking booby from the The Hunger Games films, which in the film is the symbol of hope and resistance. The mocking booby is a fictional bird.
In the Game of Thrones series , the mockingbird adorns the pin of Petyr Baelish , a member of the king's council.
In the sitcom " The Big Bang Theory " a mockingbird can be heard at the end of episode 17 of season 5 with the sound of a wind chime. Sheldon berates her with, "The grades are CGE and A! Take one of these or I'll cut your tree!" because he believes she is deliberately singing the sound of the greyhound wrong to annoy him.
literature
- Colin Harrison, Alan Greensmith: Birds. Dorling Kindersley, London 1993/2000 , ISBN 3-8310-0785-3 .
- Bryan Richard: Birds. Parragon, Bath 2006, ISBN 1-4054-5506-3 .
Web links
- Mimus polyglottos in the Red List of Threatened Species of the IUCN 2008. Posted by: BirdLife International, 2008. Accessed January 31 of 2009.
- Videos, photos and sound recordings on Mimus polyglottos in the Internet Bird Collection
- Mockingbird feathers
Individual evidence
- ↑ Is the Mockingjay from The Hunger Games Real? March 16, 2012, Retrieved May 5, 2019 (American English).
- ↑ Season 5, Episode 17 “The Rothman Disintegration”, see the series website .