Today's Birdtober calendars call for mockingbirds - either the Northern Mockingbird, seen all over the United States and Southern Canada, or any one of the approximately seventeen other mockingbird species in the world. I have four mockingbirds on my Life List, but today I decided instead to go with my colleague's Uganda Birdtober list. She put the Eastern Plantain Eater down for today, and I immediately knew why. Mockingbirds get their name from their ability to imitate other birds and even non-bird sounds. Eastern Plantain Eaters don't do that. But while not a mockingbird, this species sounds like someone laughing hysterically, poking fun at the world. (You can hear the call in the YouTube video below, although the one in the video sounds very staid; usually there are groups of them and they sound a lot more mocking than this one!)
I guess today's poem is cheating just a bit, since I didn't write it specifically for this post. Instead, I wrote it back in March after attending a Good Friday service. The bird in the poem is definitely mocking, even though I didn't use that word.
Before the Cock Crows
In the outdoor
Good Friday service
in Kampala
someone read about
Peter denying Jesus
before the cock crowed
three times,
and at that moment
an Eastern Plantain-Eater
called.
It wasn’t a rooster
but with its
slightly menacing laughter
it worked just as well.
Did I deny Jesus too,
I wondered
and the bird kept chortling
as though it knew
all the ways
I could have.
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
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