“Effing mockingbirds, man” is the title of a short Yelp thread about the San Francisco area. “Don’t they realize this ain’t the countryside?” goes the top comment. “What are they doing yelling outside my window at 5 a.m.? … I’mma cut down their tree.”

Mockingbirds are master mimickers who evolved to copy the calls of their fellow birds. They’ve also adapted to city life—including, sometimes, imitating car alarms at the break of dawn. The enterprising among you might wonder if that talent could be used to your advantage: Maybe the mockingbirds outside your window could be taught some more bearable sounds. Maybe even distinct tunes?

Let’s focus on the northern mockingbird, the bane of many an American’s morning. Their scientific name is Mimus polyglottos, meaning “many-tongued mimic.” Despite the name, though, only about half of their singing is actually mimicry. The other half is a mix of a few different native mockingbird songs—a lot of which sound something like a car alarm.

The similarity isn’t a coincidence. Dave Gammon, a biologist at Elon University, looked closely at the kinds of songs and sounds mockingbirds choose to imitate, and he found that only one factor matters: whether or not the sound is like one of those native mockingbird songs. “Whatever they hear that is acoustically similar to the sounds they already produce,” he says, “that’s what they’re most likely to copy.” And while there are some reports of mockingbirds singing national anthems or other human songs, they’re generally pretty suspect. Anyone hoping to get a mockingbird chorus to belt out Freebird is out of luck.

Strike one against your mockingbird cover band. But there’s probably still plenty of music that might—to human ears, at least—sound slightly like a mockingbird call. Could your neighbor’s alarm-filled rooftop birds be trained to copy some of that instead?

“The answer so far is: Big, fat no,” according to Gammon. Traditional ornithological wisdom holds that mockingbirds add tracks to their internal setlists throughout their lives, so he played a collection of bird calls to the area’s mockingbirds, expecting them to imitate the ones that sounded something like mockingbird calls while ignoring the rest. “What I didn’t anticipate was that they just would ignore the whole shebang,” he says. “They didn’t copy a thing. Not a lick of anything.”

Strike two. If mockingbirds won’t even imitate sounds specifically chosen to be copied, there’s probably not a lot of hope for changing the patterns of the ones outside your window.

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Gammon realized that there wasn’t much evidence supporting the idea that mockingbirds are lifelong learners. He thinks he’s shown that mockingbirds belong in the much larger cohort of mimicker birds who can learn songs when they’re young but lose the ability as they get older. They spend the rest of their lives shuffling through those same early tracks. “We still don’t really know what turns off the learning,” says biologist Eliot Brenowitz from the University of Washington. He studies songbirds’ brains, and he thinks that the transition probably has something to do with neurons. Young mimickers are constantly gaining new neurons—making new connections—in the areas of the brain associated with song-learning. Once they’re older, “these regions kind of plateau. They reach their total number of neurons.” The plateauing seems to correspond to the age when mimickers stop adding to their repertoires, but more research is needed to show a direct relationship between the two.

There is one last hope for influencing your avian neighbor’s song selection. You might have to resign yourself to wake up at the whim of your regional mockingbirds for now, but maybe you can influence future generations. If you play pleasant sounds that mockingbirds also think are worth copying, there’s a good chance you could get a cadre of little musicians belting out some easy listening. Carlos Botero, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, says that as long as a sound is reasonably close to their natural one, “they can copy it. They’re really amazing at that.”

Your choir wouldn’t be perfect, though. Botero says that once you get out of the southern United States, northern mockingbirds repeat the same calls a few times in a row in order to tell other mockingbirds that they’re not one of the birds they’re copying. “So they say, ‘hawk, hawk, hawk, hawk; crow, crow, crow, crow; bluejay, bluejay, bluejay’”—and so on. On its own, that’s not necessarily a deal breaker. You could wake up to one track on repeat, get ready to another, and leave work to another.

The real problem is that mockingbirds, as Gammon explains, are like “a DJ who’s just sampling a lot of different sounds.” They rapidly cycle through their repertoire, each song only lasting a couple seconds. Your masterpieces would be remixed.

Whether that’s a tiny victory or strike three could depend on your level of sleep deprivation.