- Soft grey all over with a darker crest
- Reminds me of the shape of a scissor-tailed flycatcher’s body though with a much, much shorter tail
- Relatively long tail and legs which are dark
- black eye and slender dark beak
- Not a mockingbird but similar
***** You should imagine a photograph here though sadly I wasn’t able to capture an image*****
Usually when I spot a new to me bird I have some idea where to start looking in the field guide. This wasn’t the case today. In fact, it took several passes through three different field guides and a second spotting of the mystery bird to identify it as a grey catbird (Dumetella carolinensis). Had it shown me its chestnut colored undertail coverts it would have been a lot easier to identify as that is the feature highlighted in all of the field guides that I consulted.
According to Ken Brock’s book Birds of the Indiana Dunes, the catbird is “a summer resident and transient through the Dunes,” (p. 165), Here in NW Indiana and are most common May through September.
According to this South Dakota bird site, it is named for “the occasional cat-like mewing sound that it makes.” According to the Cornell labs, grey catbirds are a “secretive, but curious skulker of dense thickets, the Gray Catbird is heard more than it is seen.” This seems at odds with the explanation for the idiom “in the catbird’s seat.” According to The Phrase Finder “Catbirds seek out the highest perches in trees to sing and display. The allusion to that is most likely to be the derivation of the term. It may also be the source of an earlier term with much the same meaning – ‘sitting pretty‘.”
Bay Weekly offers a playful alternative explanation for the catbird’s name. “The name [catbird] fits for another reason. Many folks have observed that cat birds and mockingbirds seem to have a special dislike for house cats. The birds get agitated and display their enmity with vocal harassment.”
Catbirds as inspiration for art, literature and idiom:
- “Catbird” by Rob Smith which won the Robert Frost Poetry Award in 2006.
- “Catbird” a poem by Mary Oliver
- Audubon’s classic painting
- The Online Etymology Dictionary explains the idiom catbird’s seat as “1731, common name for the North American thrush (Dumetella Carolinensis), so called from its warning cry, which resembles that of a cat. Catbird seat is a 19c. Dixieism, popularized by Brooklyn Dodgers baseball announcer Red Barber and by author James Thurber (1942). For exmple ‘Sitting in the catbird seat’ meant sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him.” [Thurber, "Stories from New Yorker"]“
Additional information about grey catbirds:
- Life Histories of Familar North American Birds
- Animal Diversity Web of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology
- Migratory Bird Center of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park
