All species › Passerines › Mockingbirds and thrashers › Northern Mockingbird
Northern Mockingbird | Mimus polyglottos
Spotlijster | Sinsonte norteño
The Northern Mockingbird is the best-known songbird of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, present everywhere in gardens, along roads and in open country. It is known for its endless, varied song full of imitations of other birds and of sounds in its surroundings. In Cuba it is called sinsonte, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic ruiseñor and in Jamaica nightingale. Caribbean birds belong to the subspecies orpheus.
Voice
A long, powerful song of phrases each usually repeated three or more times, with many imitations of other birds, frogs and mechanical sounds. Both sexes sing, the male far more. It also sings at night, especially by moonlight or street lighting. The call is a hard, dry chek.
Recording: Manuel Grosselet — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
23–28 cm, slender, with a long tail and a thin black bill. The upperparts are grey, with a narrow dark eye-stripe. The underparts are off-white and unmarked. The wings are blackish with two white wing bars and a large white patch at the base of the primaries, which shows as a bright white wing panel in flight. The tail is blackish, the outer tail feathers largely white. The iris is yellow to orange. The sexes are alike. Juveniles have a spotted breast and a grey-green iris.
Confusion species
Bahama Mockingbird Mimus gundlachii is larger and browner, with streaked flanks, no white wing patch and only white tail tips. Tropical Mockingbird Mimus gilvus of the Lesser Antilles and southern islands lacks the white wing patch. Grey Kingbird Tyrannus dominicensis has a dark mask, a heavy straight bill and a shorter, notched tail. Grey Catbird Dumetella carolinensis is uniformly dark grey with a black cap.
Habitat
Open country with shrubs and scattered trees: gardens, parks, yards, roadsides, pasture, coastal scrub and dry scrub, also dry open woodland. Often most numerous in towns and villages. It forages on the ground, briefly flashing its wings open so that the white patches show. It eats insects, fruit and berries. It defends its territory fiercely, even against larger birds, cats and people.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cuba with the Isla de la Juventud and the cays, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico with Vieques and Culebra, and the Virgin Islands. In the northern Bahamas migrants from North America also occur. Outside the region from southern Canada and the United States to southern Mexico; introduced to Hawaii.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In almost every garden, hotel ground and town park in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, mainly seen in spring, when males sing from aerials and rooftops and rise in a song flight. The white wing patches in flight are the best feature.
Conservation status
Not threatened and common. It benefits from settlements and open land. In the Bahamas the species is spreading into islands and habitats of Bahama Mockingbird.
Scientific name
Mimus polyglottos | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as [Turdus] polyglottos; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Mimus was introduced in 1826 by Boie. Mimus is Latin for 'mimic', after the habit of imitating other sounds. polyglottos is Greek, from polus 'many' and glossa 'tongue', after the extensive mimicking repertoire. The specimen the first description was based on came from Virginia.