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Eliot Brenowitz discusses the mental roots of avian song in this How Stuff Works article on Mockingbird calls.

Why Mockingbirds Mock

What do Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas have in common — other than a passion for college football? They've all chosen a feathered plagiarist as their official state bird. The Northern mockingbird's scientific name,Mimus polyglottos , means "mimic of many tongues." It can imitate the noises made by cardinals, blue jays, wrens, titmice and a variety of other birds. Even more remarkable is this creature's spot-on impressions of car alarms and squeaking gates.

Mimus polyglottos is just one of the 14-plus mockingbird species out there. Many of these birds are known to replicate the sounds of other animals, which begs the question of "why?" Why do mockingbirds "mock?" What evolutionary advantage does this musical talent offer? And do they ever stop learning new songs?

Bird Brains

To get some answers, we talked to biologist Dave Gammon of Elon University in North Carolina. Mockingbirds happen to be his specialty. "I started studying them over a decade ago," he says in an email. "Everyone was interested" in these mimicry specialists back then, "but no one studied their mimicry for longer than a year or two."

His investigations into their behavior cast doubt on an old assumption. Some birds like macaws and the European starling are capable of picking up new songs throughout their lives . They're what's known in the parlance of neurobiology as "open-ended learners." Other birds are "close-ended learners," which is to say they cannot master any new songs after reaching a certain age.

Ornithologists used to think mockingbirds were open-ended learners. That no longer seems to be the case. Gammon once compared many years' worth of recordings from 15 individual mockingbirds. If these feathered musicians were constantly learning new songs, you'd expect their repertoires to get bigger and bigger with age. Instead, Gammon found that the birds did not expand their personal song banks as they got older. "I think it's safe to say," Gammon says, "... that mockingbird song-learning is not as open-ended as most folks originally thought."

The mental roots of avian song acquisition are worth exploring. Eliot Brenowitz is a professor of psychology and biology at the University of Washington. He's an expert on neurological development in birds and is fascinated by the ways our feathered friends learn to vocalize.

For some close-ended learners like zebra finches , hatchlings have just one year to memorize all the songs and calls they'll need to know as adults. Then the window closes and their ability to learn new material disappears. "In bird species that learn songs only as juveniles, a region of the brain necessary for learning (called LMAN) decreases in size and neuron number during the first year of life after hatching," Brenowitz says via email. He adds that other "molecular changes" in the brain conspire to make learning more difficult as time passes. "No one has yet studied the brains of juvenile mockingbirds, so we don't know whether similar changes occur during their first year of life."

Read the entire article here .