Jack Temple Kirby 
Mockingbird Song 
Ecological Landscapes of the South

The American South is generally warmer, wetter, weedier, snakier, and more insect infested and disease prone than other regions of the country. It is alluring to the scientifically and poetically minded alike. With
Mockingbird Song, Jack Temple Kirby offers a personal and passionate recounting of the centuries-old human-nature relationship in the South. Exhibiting violent cycles of growth, abandonment, dereliction, resettlement, and reconfiguration, this relationship, Kirby suggests, has the sometimes melodious, sometimes cacophonous vocalizations of the region’s emblematic avian, the mockingbird.



In a narrative voice marked by the intimacy and enthusiasm of a storyteller, Kirby explores all of the South’s peoples and their landscapes—how humans have used, yielded, or manipulated varying environments and how they have treated forests, water, and animals. Citing history, literature, and cinematic portrayals along the way, Kirby also relates how southerners have thought about their part of Earth—as a source of both sustenance and delight.

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Jack Temple Kirby is W. E. Smith Professor Emeritus of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and currently lives on Anastasia Island in Florida. He is author or editor of eight books, including Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 and Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (from the University of North Carolina Press).