THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 3, 1996 TAG: 9608020052
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 79 lines
THERE IS a nice scene in ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' where Atticus Finch tells his children ``It's a sin to kill a mockingbird.''
Mockingbirds ``don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us,'' he says.
That's nearly true. But one of the other things a mockingbird will do is raise unshirted hell if another bird happens to invade its territory.
I was made aware of this while on vacation at Duck, N.C., with my best friend, Princess Liberal Right-Thinker.
We had rented separate kayaks - ``You'll turn me over if we sit in the same one,'' she said - and skimmed away away from the sailing center called Outer Banks Outdoors, our paddles carving the shallow water of Currituck Sound.
After circling around to get our bearings, we pointed our bows toward a distant osprey nest. The nest was atop a platform that rose from a telephone pole set in the water. We watched an osprey - a large diving hawk that feeds almost solely on fish - finish off a meal. Then we paddled away to the north, hoping to glimpse another.
In the distance we could see a large bird atop a TV antenna. The antenna rose from the roof of a house set back about 100 feet from the water. We paddled over and, sure enough, a large osprey sat atop the antenna.
The osprey is to a mockingbird what a Boeing 737 is to a hang glider. But the size difference didn't appear to inhibit a mockingbird that had staked the territory out as its own.
It began to attack the osprey, who attempted, with only modest success, to maintain its hold on the antenna, and its dignity.
When the mockingbird wasn't pecking at the osprey, it hovered over the hawk, squawking and flapping its wings in a fury.
Then, unable to budge the osprey, the mockingbird joined it on the antenna, landing about 4 feet away. It hopped sideways toward its nemesis, using its spaded tail for balance, jabbering all the while. On the last hop it extended its neck and got right up in the osprey's chest, squawking loudly.
It didn't take an interpreter to help with the bird language. The mockingbird was giving that osprey hell.
After a few minutes of the torment - like listening to the rantings of a shock jock on radio with the volume set on high - the osprey flew away.
Victorious, the mocker strutted a little and jabbered to itself now and then. I imagine it was saying: ``And if you come back here again I'm going to whip your butt.''
A short time later I fell into conversation with my friend Barbara Britt, a longtime bird watcher and protector. Years ago she persuaded Vepco (now called Virginia Power and North Carolina Power) that there was a solution to the problem of ospreys nesting next to power lines around Currituck Sound and short-circuiting the electricity with their nests made of sticks.
``If you'll build osprey-nesting platforms on poles that are away from the power lines, they won't be a problem,'' she said. The electric company thought it made sense and has been doing that since in North Carolina and elsewhere.
Barbara told me an amusing story about a mockingbird. But to appreciate it you have to understand that a mockingbird - according to ``The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds'' - has imitated the calls of 32 species of birds in 10 minutes. Among the sounds the mockingbird has imitated are the cackling of a hen, a postman's whistle and the notes of a piano.
Barbara said this past spring - before the windows were closed because of air conditioning - she had been answering the phone at her house only to find no one was there.
``I always assumed it was my father who had called,'' she said. ``He tends to be impatient. I figured he'd phoned and hung up when I didn't answer right away.''
She answered the mysterious calls for about five days - each time finding no one there.
``Then I happened to look out the window while answering what I thought was the phone and realized what had happened,'' she said. ``A mockingbird was outside making the same trilling sound the phone makes when it rings.''
She wasn't surprised that a mockingbird could imitate a phone, she said.
Barbara recalled teaching a mockingbird to whistle a tune 15 years earlier. It was a mockingbird that flew between oak and elm trees in her yard. She spent hours whistling a Mozart concerto to it.
Took the mockingbird several weeks to learn it, she said. ``But he whistled it for the rest of the summer.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff illustration/The Virginian-Pilot by CNB