What bird sings at night in California?

In California, a bird singing a medley of other birds' songs in the middle of a spring night is almost always a Northern Mockingbird, and only the unmated males do it. Low hoots, short whistles and tremolos from the woods are owls, such as the Great Horned Owl and the Western Screech-Owl. A monotonous poor-will repeated from dusk to dawn on a dry, open slope is a Common Poorwill, and a quok from the shore of the bay after dark is a Black-crowned Night-Heron.

Listen: the Northern Mockingbird

If the singer seems to be borrowing material, it is a mockingbird. The Birds of Stanford account, written about the Stanford University campus, says plainly that only unmated males sing at night in spring, and that unmated males sing more than mated ones. The song is built from the songs and calls of other birds, so a single mockingbird can sound like half the neighborhood taking turns. The bird keeping you up in spring is a bachelor, and the night shift is part of his search.

Mockingbirds use a wide range of open and partly open habitats and are abundant in suburbs, which is exactly where most Californians hear them. They are newer to the north than you might think: the Stanford account notes the species did not historically live on the campus, that southern California populations spread northward over the last century, and that a bird seen there in 1893 may have been the first record for the San Francisco Bay Area. Today it is a common to abundant resident on campus, nesting and feeding all over it.

The owls

Hoots and whistles from the trees mean owls, and Redwood National and State Parks on the north coast gives a good roll call. The Great Horned Owl is the largest owl in the parks, a bird of wooded habitats with a low hoo-hoo-hoo, sometimes seen as a silhouette on a perch at dusk. The Western Screech-Owl is relatively common there in open woods and along forest edges, and its so-called screech is really a series of short whistles or tremolos. In deep conifer woods, a loud, repeated toot-toot-toot that goes on for minutes is a highly nocturnal Northern Saw-whet Owl; see What bird beeps at night?.

Two more owls tell a story. The Barred Owl is a newcomer from the eastern United States that has displaced the Spotted Owl in the parks; the Spotted Owl, now very rare there, has a four-note territorial song, and the Barred Owl's is longer. And around the parks' historic barns, a Barn Owl may be roosting, hunting mostly on the wing over open ground in search of rodents. Its voice is covered on What bird screams at night?.

Common Poorwill: the voice of the dry hills

The Common Poorwill is named for its call, a monotonous poor-will given from dusk to dawn, with a third syllable you can hear only at close range; in flight it gives a chuck note. It lives in dry, open country with grasses or shrubs, even stony desert slopes with almost no plants. At about seven inches it is the smallest nightjar in North America. California holds a place in its story: in 1946 Edmund Jaeger found a poorwill hibernating in the Chuckwalla Mountains, and his 1948 description established that this bird can stay torpid for weeks to months, something no other bird is known to do. Many northern poorwills spend the winter in Mexico.

Black-crowned Night-Heron: the quok by the bay

This stocky heron lives year-round along the shores of San Francisco Bay, and its largest rookery there is in Oakland, where its constant presence at Lake Merritt and around downtown earned it the title of the city's official bird. It hunts by standing still at the water's edge and ambushing prey, mainly at night, in the early morning and in the evening, and it spends the day resting in dense trees or bushes. The birds nest in colonies on stick platforms in groups of trees and are very noisy there, with calls written as quok or woc.

How to tell which one you heard

• A medley of borrowed songs from a yard, deep into a spring night: Northern Mockingbird.
• Low, soft hoots from woods: Great Horned Owl. Short whistles or a tremolo from an open wood or forest edge: Western Screech-Owl. Steady toots for minutes in conifers: saw-whet.
• Two syllables, poor-will, all night from a dry, open hillside: Common Poorwill.
• A quok near the water, or a racket from a group of trees by a lake: Black-crowned Night-Heron.

If you want a name rather than a hunch, Warble can listen from the porch and tell you, though a mockingbird in mid-impression can make any listener, human or app, hesitate for a phrase or two.

Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Facts about birds on this page come from the sources above.