The Mockingbird That Answered the Phone
For one whole spring a mockingbird copied my ringtone so well that I answered the pasture instead of the bank, and he never apologized.
There is a mockingbird in the big cottonwood by my gate, and he has talent. He can do a meadowlark, a screen door, a dog bark and, as I found out in April, the opening four notes of my phone.
The first time I went for my pocket I was thirty feet from the truck, checking water in the trough. The ring was loud, clear and unmistakable. I fished out my phone and stared at the black screen. No missed calls. I put it back and went on with the trough. Two minutes later it rang again, and this time I swore at it. The mockingbird, perched on the fence post six feet away, looked down at me with a quiet air of satisfaction.
He did it for three weeks. I answered thin air in the lot, in the barn, in the shop, and once, memorably, at the exact moment the loan officer had told me she would be calling. I stood in the yard shouting 'Hello? Hello?' into a dead phone while she, as I later learned, left a message wondering if something was wrong with the line. She called back. This time it was the real phone and the bird was silent, as if he had said his piece.
I tried everything. I changed the ringtone, and he learned the new one by lunch. I put the phone on vibrate, and he started doing a vibrating phone, which I did not know a bird could do. The neighbor suggested a scarecrow. I told him the bird was the scarecrow, and I was the crow.
By June I gave up and left it alone, and in July he moved on to a tractor backfire, which was an improvement. My phone has rung true ever since. I have told this story to every banker I have met, and to a few hundred listeners on farm.FM, and the verdict is always the same: when you cannot beat the bird, let him have the spring.
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