Red Barber and the Cat Bird Seat

Red Barber and the Cat Bird Seat


I spent the first half of my youth in Westchester County, a little outside of New York City. That was back in the fifties and one of my memories was listening to baseball games on the radio. We had a TV, it was big but the screen was little and often the sound didn’t come through, so the family would watch a ball game in black and white, but listen to the color commentary.

Our family was about equally divided in loyalties. One third supported the New York Giants, another third were Red Sox fans and third I was counted with rooted for the Yankees. About once a year we make a family outing to the stadium to see a game in person, usually, when the Red Sox were in town, but mostly our contact with professional baseball came through the radio.

Even the two thirds of the household that weren’t Yankee fans, knew that the Yankees had the best organist and the best announcers: Mel Allen on the TV and Red Barber on the radio. Red had a distinctive voice and a delightful sense of humor and humility. Somewhere during his career he came up with phrase that no one else had ever heard, but once uttered, everyone understood, and that was “Sitting in the Cat Bird Seat.”

Cat birds are not normally native to New York State, but every New Yorker, knew that if someone was sitting where the cat bird would sit, he was sitting pretty, on top of things, overlooking all things beneath him.

Moving to Virginia at the age of ten, I discovered Mocking Birds. For many years I thought cat bird was simply another name for the mocking bird, but they are distinctive species. Though similar in size and general coloration, their markings are quite different. They share the habit though, of finding a perch overlooking their domain. The other day I confirmed a pair of cat birds here on the farm. There are probably eight or ten pair of mocking birds and at least two pair of brown thrashers – also very closely related -, but this was the first sighting of nesting cat birds.

More rare than either thrasher or cat bird, there is a mocking bird down the lane that thinks it’s a duck. Mocking birds are wonderful mimics. They’ll sit on their high perches and blast away for twenty minutes at a time, going through a repertoire of original and borrowed birdcalls. I was told once that they’ve even been known to mimic a human’s whistle. At the age of twelve I remember whistling the same tune every morning to the birds hoping that I’d hear an answering whistle, but I never did. Nor, until this summer, have I ever heard the impersonation of the quack of a duck.

Actually, it took me several times of hearing the call before I realized it wasn’t a duck. I couldn’t figure what a duck was doing at the entrance to our lane, but I thought perhaps the neighbors had gotten a tame duck to walk around their yard. It turned out to be the mocking bird. After a couple of quacks, he or she continues with a more normal call list. I think though, it’s spreading for I’ve heard what seems to be a second bird in a different location quacking. So there seems to be two mocking birds, sitting in Red Barber's cat bird seat pretending to be a duck.