I was up early this morning and got to see the ibis doing their silent dawn takeoff from their rookery across the way. But just because they were silent doesn’t mean this morning was. No, the air was full of bird sounds, a cacophony of high and low notes, of trills and chirps, and all of it was coming from a handful of mockingbirds.

A friend recently told me she heard a cardinal in the yard and was looking around for it. But when she found it, it was a mockingbird. It had completely fooled her with a complicated cardinal song that was spot on and she is a serious birder.

Myself, I came out the other day to run to the store and hit my car’s alarm off button. It sounded the appropriate rapid dweep-dweep sound and that was followed immediately by a series of dweep-dweeps from the top of the telephone pole at the end of the driveway. Yep, a mockingbird.

I have heard them mimic almost anything. In town here, not far from US1 there are plenty of fire trucks and ambulances and our mockingbirds have taken note of that and frequently make siren sounds. Sometimes they give a little bark like the neighborhood dogs or start imitating the noisy parrots and that live around here.

Birdjam.com describes the song as a “long-continued stream of loud phrases, many being imitations of other birds’ songs and calls along with squeaky gates, machinery, barking dogs and humans whistling.” The males sing in the spring and more loudly than the females. Both sexes sing in the fall. Mockingbirds often sing at night.

All my life I have watched and listened to mockingbirds but never really gave them a lot of thought until this morning. Sure, they are the Florida state bird but so what? And sure there was an old song from my mother’s days but I can’t seem to find who did it though I can hear it in my mind.

Turns out that song was much older than I thought — it was written by Septimus Winner under the pseudonym of Alice Hawthorne in 1855. It was a sad song about a sweetheart who had died and the mockingbird that sang over her grave. Supposedly Abraham Lincoln liked the song (it was widely used as marching music during the Civil War) and he is quoted as saying, “It is as sincere as the laughter of a little girl at play.” Perhaps it reminded him of the laughter of his own lost-too-young sons, Eddie, Willie and Tad, forever sleeping in a valley somewhere with a mockingbird’s song for company.

The Three Stooges used it as a theme song for a while and it was recorded by a variety of swing and jazz groups and has more recently been revived as a traditional folk song.

Here’s a modern version of the original folk version of Listen to the Mockingbird by Tom Roush if you want to give a listen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvr3lbxi1a0

But I guess when I think of mockingbirds the first thing I think of is the line in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” saying it’s a sin to kill one. (In that strange way that the world brings disparate things together, I just read that 87 year-old Harper Lee just sued her agent on May 3, 2013 to regain her copyright that he allegedly wrongfully took from her.)

“Atticus said to Jem one day, ‘I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. ‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’”

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Seems like that’s the truth. I know that just after dawn today they were singing their hearts out and filling up the morning air with a wild bunch of sound that didn’t have one mean bone in it.

I recently met a cool biologist named Benny Luedike who works for the state DEP and he sent me some photos of a project in Ft. Pierce within the Indian River Lagoon to create a series “barrier islands” to protect the city operated harbor. 

Humans have tried to protect what they consider theirs for as long as they could figure out a way to do so but they didn’t always think about unintended consequences. We built dams and caused downstream marshes and wetlands and their incubator essence to be lost. We took down forests to grow a better cash crop and threatened the diversity of our planet. In Florida we drained the Everglades to grow beans and tomatoes in the verdant muck and though we have changed direction on the wisdom of that decision, much of our food (and OMG the sod farms stretch out forever) still comes from large farms ringing Okeechobee. Don’t forget big sugar either.

We hailed DDT as the miracle that would let us feed ourselves better and cheaper. Turned out to cause cancer and nearly killed off the bald eagles.

Florida has busy sucking as much water out of the ground as possible for golf courses and developments or to sell as “spring water” and all the while our aquifer has been dropping lower until our fabulous springs are being threatened.

As a nation and a state we are finally taking a harder look at what we want to do and are trying to make sure that, like a doctor, we first do no harm. That’s a big part of what Benny does, he reviews proposed projects to see if they can be done without causing harm whether unintended or not.

In this case, the Ft. Pierce barrier island proposal was subjected to a lot scrutiny to make sure it would not cause erosion problems further down the shore or that it would cause the seagrass (another big incubator) to silt up and disappear. FEMA, the organization that provided partial funding, said an ecological component had to be included in any harbor protection plans. What is being created seems like an elegant solution. 

The 11 acres of islands will not only protect the harbor by breaking up incoming tidal action and wind driven waves, it will create a new series of habitats that will include an island that’s perfect as a shorebird nesting habitat, a mangrove habitat and oyster reefs. This protection will then allow the marina destroyed in the ’04-’05 hurricanes to be rebuilt.  

One part of me looks at parks and restored lands and thinks, but this isn’t nature in the raw, much the same way some cute historic towns are really not Old Florida. And it’s not. But neither is it the Disneyfication (no insult meant to mouse and co.) of a natural area. It is the nurturing of an area to create something that nature itself could have and might have created given enough time and protected from enough detrimental human action.

All over the state nonprofit groups and grassroots organizations are working hard with government agencies on the nurturing side of things. We are seeing increased protections for our waterways and shores and coming to new understandings about land use. Turns out cattle ranches are pretty good for our prairie-like lands in mid state. Who knew?

So the next time you paddle around the bend in a little river and feel like you are the first human to ever see this piece of glorious land and water give a little smile and know you probably are not. And you probably wouldn’t have had that experience if a lot of other dedicated folks hadn’t worked to keep it just like that. People like Benny. People like you.

It’s 6:30 a.m. and the sky has pinkened up nicely. Toward the horizon over the Atlantic slate blue clouds are piling up and will begin their march toward land where they will dissipate or maybe coalesce and dump some rain. I’m waiting for the ibis.

Every morning, near sunrise, the huge flock of ibis that roost in the trees lining the short waterway across the street give a collective shake and then take off, silently, as a group. Usually they come straight up out of the trees like a covey of quail flushed from the brush by a good bird dog and then all fly off in the same direction. It’s as if they are commuters headed to work and in a way they are. Somewhere, and they seem to know where that is, there are plenty of delicious grubs and bugs just waiting to be beaked up. My guess is golf courses though during the day you are likely to see them almost anywhere around Fort Lauderdale — parking lots, quiet streets with small lawns, mega houses with equally impressive boats in the canals behind them.

Once in a while the ibis seem to get their magnetic compasses out of whack and then they swirl and re-roost and re-take off abortively a few times before settling into their purpose and winging away. Still, it’s a silent thing.

The parrots on the other hand are noisy from the get go. Their flight seems as intoxicating to them as teenagers on a roller coaster and like the teenagers they scream and screech as they wheel around the sky.

Before the parrots do their first morning takeoff they sometimes gather in the tops of the trees and murmur to each other in parrot talk. Occasionally it’s just one parrot, a lone sentinel turning this way and that before giving some signal to the others that it’s time to fly and scream.

The young ibis tend to stick closer to the roosting area and it’s common to see their brown and white bodies bobbing down the streets nearby.

The parrots definitely break into smaller groups and swoop around chattering and looking for bird feeders and other easy targets.

At night, everyone comes home. The parrots come in dribs and drabs, the ibis have joined up as they return and arrive in a big bunch to throw their wings up over their heads to make a graceful drop into the trees below.

When you spend time in one place you get to notice these things and know them in the same way that you know how to park your car or tie your shoes. It just becomes part of what you carry around without thinking about it. You might be drinking coffee and suddenly think, it’s time for the ibis and wander over to the window, cup in hand, just in time to see their silent arrowing across the sky.