Feathered Friday: the Gray Catbird

A computer crash prevented me from posting last week to Feathered Friday, so please forgive the omission. 

Today I'm posting on another member of the Family Mimidae--the Gray Catbird.  Members of this family we've thus far met include the Northern Mockingbird (see May 18, 2012 post) and the Brown Thrasher (post prior to this one).  The Northern Mockingbird and Gray Catbird regularly visit my yard, so I hear them singing all the time. The video here provides many samples of the catbird's songs, comparing these to their original sources--the birds (or frog!) from whom the catbird fashioned his "stylings."

I found this useful fact from the web (see link and citation below): "Catbird songs can last many minutes and include more than a hundred different sounds. You can tell a catbird's song from a mockingbird's song by the number of repetitions in a row. A mockingbird will repeat a phrase or sound three times in a row or more, but a catbird will use each phrase once. And of course, catbirds usually throw in a meow."

The Westborough News, June 29, 2007 (by Annie Reid)
http://westboroughlandtrust.org/nn/nn78.php

I highly recommend that you visit the page above to learn many more interesting facts about the Gray Catbird, because that "mewing" you hear in the dense shrubbery may not be a neighbor's cat after all . . .

Until next time . . . Keep birds in your heart!

Georgia Anne