The species lives year-round on its range, which overlays most of the lower 48 states and includes southern Canada, the Caribbean islands and Mexico. Mockingbirds live in towns and cities, where they often forage on lawns and in thickets, road margins, woods edges, cut-over lands, and farms. They like a mix of low shrubs and open terrain. In Pennsylvania mockingbirds are most common in the southeast, the southcentral (although not in the mountains) and the southwestern regions.
About half of the diet consists of insects and half of native and cultivated fruits. When hunting for insects, a mockingbird will run along on the ground in short grass, stopping and lunging for its prey: beetles, ants, bees, wasps, grasshoppers, and others. Mockingbirds also eat spiders, earthworms, snails, and sowbugs. In fall and winter, berries and fruits make up most of the diet including grapes, apples, barberries, hawthorn, elderberries, and (a particular favorite) multiflora rose hips. Mockingbirds sometimes drive off cedar waxwings and other birds, with whom they compete for fruit. In winter mockingbirds may visit feeding stations for seeds and suet, pugnaciously chasing other birds away.
Both male and female mockingbirds sing, but the males are the true virtuosos. They mimic snatches of other birds' songs, calls of crickets and frogs, dogs barking and mechanical noises like squeaky hinges and squealing tires. A male's repertoire increases as the bird ages and may ultimately include more than 150 distinct song types. Usually an individual repeats one sound or song three to six or more times, then switches to another song, and so on, singing for minutes on end. (Brown thrashers usually repeat each song once, while catbirds do not repeat.) In the spring, male mockingbirds sing to establish territories and attract mates, starting in around an hour before sunrise. They sing in flight, on the ground, from perches, when building nest foundations, during and after copulation, while foraging--even with food clutched in their bills. Unmated males may sing during the night, usually from a hidden perch. Mockingbirds sing from March to August (during the breeding season) and from late September into November (while establishing fall and winter feeding territories).
Mockingbirds are mainly monogamous. Courting males and females chase each other in flight. The nest is a bulky cup built in a dense shrub or a tree, usually three to 10 feet above the ground. The female lays three or four greenish to bluish gray eggs, blotched with brown. She incubates them 12 to 13 days. Both sexes feed the young, which fledge after 12 days, although they're not strong fliers for another week. At fledging, the male may continue to feed the young while the female lays and begins incubating the next clutch. This division of labor lets mockingbirds produce two and sometimes three broods (up to four in the South) during each breeding season. Mockingbirds aggressively defend their nests, driving away predators and attacking humans who venture too close.
Some mockingbirds spend the whole year as a pair on a single territory, while others, particularly in the northern part of the range, use different breeding and wintering territories. In the north, some individuals may migrate south in winter. Young disperse up to 200 miles from where they hatched. Ornithologists believe the spread of multiflora rose (an invasive species once planted widely for wildlife habitat) and the planting of ornamental shrubs (especially Pvracantha, or fire thorn) provided key winter food and shelter, aiding the mockingbird in a northward population expansion that has gone on for close to a century.
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