Literature: Nature in To Kill a Mockingbird

Since one of my two strongest areas is nature, I have to do the To Kill a Mockingbird task about nature.

The task:

Do a research on the natural habitat of mockingbird. In your research, include the kind of flora and fauna you think exist in Maycomb and explain why the mockingbirds live in Maycomb.

Mockingbirds are a fairly widespread species and live in areas such as the Galapagos and North and Central America. The species of mockingbird in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird is the Northern Mockingbird, which lives in Northern Mexico, USA and Canada. They are intelligent, highly adaptable and bold birds which dare to nest near houses but naturally live in areas with open ground and shrubs.

Mockingbirds eat ripe berries, garden insects and small vertebrates such as lizards. The Radley’s yard is mentioned to have pecan trees with numerous pecans. (“tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children” page 15) This would attract the opportunist mockingbirds looking for a meal. Maycomb also has a wide variety of choice insects, as seen from the “roly-poly”, “lightning bugs”, “night-crawlers” and “flying insects” present about the area on page 244.

Maycomb also has good habitats for mockingbirds. Mockingbirds prefer leafy trees to pine trees and have a particular preference for high places (“tall pecan trees” page 15, “oak trees” page 14), such as the topmost branches of trees. All these characteristics are present in the trees of Maycomb. Furthermore, mockingbirds like to forage for food among vegetation or on open ground. Maycomb has low-lying vegetation in gardens which would allow such behavior, such as “Giant monkey-puzzle bushes”, page 155, “azaleas”, page 14 and “rabbit tobacco”, page 14. Mockingbirds use dry grass and small twigs to construct their nests, of which Maycomb also has plenty, having species such as “nut grass”, page 48, and “johnson grass”, page 155.

In all, Maycomb is an ideal place for Mockingbirds to live in as it has their preferred habitat and ample food for their dinner menu.

Some types of flora and fauna in Maycomb have already been mentioned earlier- roly-polys (which are probably woodlice), lightning bugs (which are fireflies but fireflies aren’t actually flies but beetles) and deciduous leafy trees such as oaks. Some other wild animals were mentioned throughout the length of the novel-such as opossums, adaptable, forest-dwelling marsupials which the Negroes cooked for Christmas, and rabbits, which unfortunately were also included in the Negroes’ barbecue (page 177, by the way Atticus is wrong, wahaha, possums live in Australia). From Jem’s description of Boo Radley eating “raw squirrels”, I can also safely infer that American red squirrels, which are widespread in North America, are present in Maycomb. However, their main food source is the seeds of conifer cones. Therefore pine trees probably exist in Maycomb as well. And since m ockingbirds have a strong preference for certain trees such as maple, sweetgum, and sycamore, which are present in North America, there are probably these trees in Maycomb too.