Plate 128 – Cat Bird

When lambs sleep with lions, maybe birds will cuddle up to cats. Until then, birds like the Cat Bird will have every reason to suspect and worry about the intentions of the grimalkin. “The sight of a dog seldom irritates it, while a single glance at the wily cat excites the most painful paroxysms of alarm.” The bird that John James Audubon called the Cat Bird is now known as the Gray catbird. And rather than looking like a cat or raising the alarm at cats, the catbird gets its name from sounding like a cat when it voices its “mew” calls. The Gray catbird also tends to hide like a cat in the low and middle parts of dense foliage like the blackberry bush as drawn by Joseph Mason for Birds of America.