What bird sounds like a cat?

The bird that sounds like a cat is almost always a Gray Catbird. Its everyday call is a nasal, down-slurred meeoow, given from deep inside a hedge, a thicket or a streamside tangle, and the bird is named for it. You hear it in summer in yards, parks and woodland edges; most catbirds spend the winter in the southern states or the tropics. On brushy western mountain slopes, a mew from the bushes may instead be a Green-tailed Towhee or a Spotted Towhee.

Listen: the Gray Catbird

The catbird has two voices, and people usually notice the call first. It is a single whining mew, slurred downward, close enough to a house cat or a lost kitten to send you looking under the bushes. Audubon's guide puts it plainly: the bird's name comes from that catlike mewing. Next to it you may hear a harsh tcheck or kute, the bird's other complaint.

The song is something else entirely. A catbird improvises a long, loose stream of whistles, squeaks, clicks and nasal notes, with musical phrases and mechanical-sounding ones thrown together, and it can keep going for minutes without a break. It also borrows bits from other birds: the Missouri Department of Conservation mentions cardinals, robins and wrens, and even frogs and chickens. Early in the breeding season the males sing hard in the morning and evening, and sometimes at night.

What you will rarely get is a good look. The bird is smooth dark gray, robin-sized, with a black cap and a rusty patch under the tail, and it spends its time low in dense shrubs, flipping leaves on the ground for insects. That is why so many people know the mew long before they know the bird making it.

Other birds that mew like a cat

Catbirds are rarely seen in the Southwest, and in the West a mew from the brush may well be a towhee.

Green-tailed Towhee. Audubon notes that a catlike mewing in the bushes is often the first sign of this bird, and describes its call as a short, nasal mew. It summers on brushy mountain slopes, in sage, manzanita, low chaparral and open pine, and stays low in thick cover, so the mew is all most people get. Now and then one wanders east in fall and turns up at a winter feeder, sometimes as far as the Atlantic Coast.

The Spotted Towhee lives in undergrowth and brushy edges across the West, often in chaparral, manzanita thickets, scrub oak or pinyon-juniper woods. Its call, which Audubon spells meewww?, is a mewing note with a question mark on the end, and it comes from the undergrowth where the bird lives.

How to tell which one you heard

• Falling or rising? The catbird's mew slides down at the end. A Spotted Towhee's call goes up, like a question.
• Where are you? A suburban hedge, a park thicket or a shrubby stream edge in summer points to a catbird. Mountain brush, sagebrush, manzanita or chaparral in the West points to a towhee.
• What else does it say? A catbird will often slip into its long, jumbled song, with almost no phrase repeated. A Spotted Towhee's song is a long, buzzy trill. A Green-tailed Towhee's is a lively string of slurred notes and short buzzes.
• What month is it? Most catbirds leave for the southern states or the tropics in fall, so a mew from a northern hedge in midwinter is less likely to be one.
• Is it on a fence or under a bush? Catbirds and towhees are birds of thickets and undergrowth. If something is mewing from an open fence post and you can see it, it may simply be a cat.

If the mew keeps coming and you still cannot see the bird, let Warble listen for a few seconds while it calls. A catbird that switches into song makes it easier, because the song carries a lot more information than one mew.

Questions people ask

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