The catbirds that can ‘ meow,’ imitate frogs

Say “scat” to a cat and it runs away.

Say “scat” to a catbird and it starts to improvise. It’s a hepcat bird.

These all- gray bird, blackberet- wearing birds can sing for minutes at a time, although it’s not exactly a song. It’s an extended collection of squeaks and slurs and disjointed melodic bits with the occasional “meow’ thrown in. ( Their alarm note is the cat’s meow. Hence their name.)

Right now, they’re arriving from the south.

“We’ve seen them here,’’ said Bethany Sheffer, volunteer coordinator and naturalist at the Sharon Audubon Center, owned by Audubon Connecticut.

Sheffer said the center’s nearby Miles Sanctuary is even a more happening place.

“They’ve just been pouring in there,” she said.

“I’ve seen them on my property but I haven’t heard them yet,” said Redding birder Michael Carpenter. “I think they’re just arriving and setting up shop. In another week or so, they’ll start singing.”

While catbirds prefer thick shrubs for nesting spots, the males solo from high perches. If you are sitting in the catbird seat, it’s a good place to be.

Why such extravagant vocalizing? Really, why does any male warble?

“It attracts the ladies,” said Patrick Comins, president of the Connecticut Audubon Society.

And the more varied the song, the more extra phrases and show- off chatter, the more successful the male catbird will be in finding a mate. It shows females that he’s experienced.

“It means they’re able to defend their territory.” Comins said.

Along with northern mockingbirds and brown thrashers, catbirds are one of three mimids in the state – birds that can mimic other birds’ songs, or even other sounds around them. Catbirds have been heard to add frog croaks to the mix. City- nesting mockingbirds can imitate car alarms.

Donald Kroodsma, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and one of the nation’s most knowledgeable ornithologists when it comes to bird songs, said that of the three, brown thrashers have the greatest repertoire, with 1,000 to 2,000 different song units.

“It’s all stored in their brain,’’ said Kroodsma, author of “The Singing Life of Birds.” “It’s ready for when two males start arguing about territory.”

Catbirds are next, he said, with 200 to 400 songs units, with mockingbirds, maintaining about 100 units.

Sweet- singing mockingbirds tend to repeat a musical phrase four to six times before moving on to the next. Brown thrashers repeat a phrase twice.

“They sound like a catbird with a stutter,’’ said Comins of the Connecticut Audubon Society.

Catbirds don’t repeat. They just let loose with what some have described as garble. Ornithologists have recorded them singing 170 different phrases in a 4.5 minute song.

Kroodsma said that catbirds fledglings babble like babies learning to talk.

“They really are improvising,” he said.

Young catbirds, exposed only to mature catbird songs have a more limited repertoire, Kroodsma said. It’s being out in the world, listening to cardinals and robins and titmice that gives them more bits to add to their crazy quilt collection.

Comins said in Connecticut, catbirds are the mimids most people will groove to.

Brown thrashers like open countryside with patches of thickets to nest in. Comins said other than the state’s coastline, that habitat is disappearing in the state — it’s either mature forest, agricultural fields or development.

As a result, brown thrashers are now listed as a Species of Special Concern in Connecticut. Comins said they’ve declined by 99.5 percent in the state over the past 50 years.

Northern mockingbirds are, in fact, a southern- state species. Comins said they began to arrive in numbers in the north in the 1950s and 1960s.

But for a variety of reasons, they’ve begun to leave the scene here. Between 2000 and 2015, they declined by 8 percent a year, for a 57 percent overall drop. Habitat loss may be playing a part in this decline as well.

“It could be due to any number of things,” Comins said.

But catbirds are holding their own, if not increasing in numbers. They nest on dense shrubs, digging in the ground underneath the foliage with their beaks for insects.

But they also can feed on berries and fruit. And they have adapted to suburban settings, nesting in thick clumps of forsythia or untended raspberry patches. When the dawn chorus starts, they jam along in our backyards.

It’s that that makes them so cool.

“They’re really a wild migratory bird that’s adapted to our surroundings,” Comins said.