Are human beings naturally monogamous? Or is having one sexual partner for life something that has been imposed on us by priests and ayatollahs? Is getting married, in other words, “natural”?
People have been looking to birds for wisdom ever since Roman soothsayers observed the way crows were flying before recommending the advisability or otherwise of battle, and probably for much longer. Bernd Heinrich, a veteran US ornithologist, knows better than to draw anthropomorphic parallels between birds and people, and in this beautifully produced and engagingly narrated book on the birds of New England and their nesting and mating habits he avoids any suggestion of simplistic moralizing. Nevertheless, the status of human monogamy is an almost secret subtext that runs through the whole work.
Some commentators have gratefully asserted that “Yes, there is true love among birds!” is the essential import of The Nesting Season. This is not Heinrich’s message, however. Indeed, at one point he insists that strict monogamy can only be found in nature in a parasitic worm where the male and female entwine in one’s liver in an incessant lifelong copulation. But the truth is that there isn’t really a “message” here at all. Instead, the author lovingly describes the birds he’s observed in his home country of Vermont, plus others he’s watched from a cabin in the Maine woods, blending in communications he’s received from correspondents from Germany to Mongolia. He also summarizes much of the newest research on topics that interest him. He then goes on to illustrate the text with his superb photos of nests, complete with eggs or young, and paintings he made, some going back to when he was under 10, of eggs, and also of the birds themselves.
But the question of monogamy does feature specifically, notably in one long chapter. And some bird species are indeed monogamous, or appear to be so. But humans have a long history of seeing what they want to see, and hence of attributing virtues to the animal kingdom that they would like to see in themselves (the indomitable British bulldog, the royal lion, the self-sacrificing pelican, the peaceful dove). But on the issue of bird monogamy or otherwise, Heinrich’s picture is one, not only of almost infinite variety, but also of flexibility. The European white stork, for instance, once thought to be truly monogamous, is revealed as being faithful, instead, to a particular nesting site. The male will return there again and again, and if last year’s mate arrives at around the same time he will indeed mate with her. But if a different female arrives there first, he’ll mate with her instead.
Other birds are totally non-pairing. The male hummingbird, for example, fertilizes his chosen female in a process that takes only about two seconds, then flies away and is never seen again. The female, as a result, becomes nature’s single mother par excellence.
Others, such as ducks, form a nesting pair as a couple, but are not averse to some copulation on the side with a different partner should the opportunity arise. The most nearly monogamous birds appear to be ravens. Even the extraordinary albatross, which flies thousands of kilometers over desolate oceans on a single food-gathering expedition, and whose pairs have been known to return to the same nest site for 60 years, nevertheless has been found to have up to a quarter of the young in the nest fathered by a different male from the main partner.
What Heinrich is demonstrating, in other words, is variety. Bird species are all different. And so, if you want to persist in making the comparison, are humans. I was told last week about a Hong Kong man who claims to have had sexual congress with 7,000 women (so far) during the course of his life, while there are on every hand married men who at least appear to be quite content with just one partner. Others no doubt mix these two lifestyles in so far as they are able to get away with it. Others again prefer their own sex. “Same-sex partnering is probably much more common ‘in the wild’ than currently supposed,” Heinrich writes.
Again, people aren’t birds. But, if there is a moral to be drawn, it’s that people, like birds, are different, and that even birds in differing circumstances can be remarkably flexible (just as some prisoners held in all-male prisons, it’s said, become gay in effect, but revert to heterosexuality when released).
This itself is a powerful and liberating message, but it seems to be one that mankind needs to constantly re-learn. It’s not so long ago that gays were burned at the stake in Europe, and even today women accused of adultery in some parts of the world are sentenced to be stoned to death. Birds, by contrast, appear to have no religions, and are as a result immune to such draconian attempts at sexual coercion.
Most readers, though, will not approach this wonderful book in search of moral, or any other, guidance. They will, instead, look at it in awe — not at human fidelity or its opposite, but at bird ingenuity and variousness. They will also be envious of Heinrich’s lifestyle and mind-set, climbing 15m up a pine tree to inspect a raven’s nest taken over by owls, relating how a pair of robins successfully raised young on board a Maine ferry, and marveling at how swifts fly 915m high on the first day after leaving the nest.
Despite his close focus on birds, Heinrich does make some direct comments on our human assumptions. “What our culture would classify as ‘true’ love typically lasts for only 18 to 30 months,” he writes. “After that we either part or remain friends and stay together out of habit or perhaps mutual ‘nest-site fidelity.’” And again, “The ‘traditional’ human monogamous relationship has always been in part cultural, and as culture changes, so will our mores.”
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