The three loud mockingbirds of Charles Darwin

Sunday morning. Trying to sleep in. No chance. Not one, not two, but three mockingbirds flit around and land in the tree right outside, going “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” Aggressively, non-stop.

“They’re mockingbirds alright,” says Jen Hajj later. She’s San Diego Audubon’s Events Membership Coordinator. “But they’re just saying ‘This is where I am going to be. Stay away.’ They are also doing their best to attract a mate. It’s usually repetitive. And they start this song very early in the morning.”

Great. There goes the sleep-in. But also, I can’t help thinking: three mockingbirds, sitting in the five-finger tree? It’s as though they’re talking to me. Makes me think of a BBC program on bird language where they electronically took away certain elements of human speech until people sounded exactly like birds, to demonstrate how we have many parts of our speech in common.

“Well, they used to be velociraptors,” says Jen. “Chickens, especially, have more T. Rex in their DNA than, say, mockingbirds.”

“That’s it!” I say. “The three mockingbirds! Charles Darwin! Voyage of HMS Beagle. The birth of evolution theory!” I’m remembering the picture of three actual mockingbirds Darwin collected in the Galapagos Islands, back in 1835. The Natural History Museum in London still has them, showing their slight variations, which sent a rocket through the scientific world. Those three mockingbirds from separate islands confirmed his suspicions that species don’t remain static. They adapt to differing conditions.

And according to Phys.org, there’s a big effort to reintroduce a single mixed population of mockingbirds to the Galapagos island of Floreana, where they went extinct sometime after Darwin visited. Of course, according to Jen, my three guys here are Northern mockingbirds, part of a robust year-round population which has to fear only two things: cats (cats kill an unbelievable 3.7 billion birds every year in the US, according to a Smithsonian study, not to mention 20.7 billion small mammals), and climate change.

“Right now, climate change applies more to migrant songbirds than your resident mockingbirds,” says Jen. “Until now, when they get where they’re going, they’ve always had these resources to fly to. Like when birds are leaving Mexico, it might be the same time caterpillars are starting to hatch. Now they may be hatching later. Or more dry conditions may mean those caterpillars aren’t hatching at all. So birds get to that place and they’re exhausted. So ready to eat, and there’s nothing.”

Now she’s reading from her birding Bible, the Birder’s Handbook. “Mockingbirds’ cup-shaped nest is tended by both the male and female. They lay 3-5 blue-green eggs, heavily marked with brown spots. Incubation is about 14 days. Then it takes another 14 days for the kiddos to fledge. So a month before they can fly to safety. This is when you should be locking your cats up.”

Me, I’m more concerned with the adaptation of my own species. I’m going to have to deal with being woken up, every day, before dawn, by that three-mockingbird “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” chorus. It’s probably been going on since dinosaur times. I can just hear those poor sleep-deprived velociraptors yelling “Shyaddaaaap!”

No wonder they went extinct.