Bridget Stutchbury
In her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood invents new animals to entertain us and get across her concerns about environmental and social collapse. "Rakunks" (part raccoon and part skunk) and "liobams" (lions mixed with sheep) are the disturbing results of bizarre biological manipulations.
In The Bird Detective, Bridget Stutchbury, a York University professor and author of the Governor-General's-Award-nominated Silence of the Songbirds, also uses animals to illustrate the effect humankind is having on nature. And she does it very effectively without Atwood's black wit and disturbing scenarios.
The Bird Detective, in fact, is a cheery little book. Stutchbury delights readers with hundreds of amazing facts and stories about birds, mostly songbirds, which serve to make it all the more tragic that climate change, habitat loss, pesticide use, long-line fishing and other environmental sins are mixing up extraordinary behaviours that have evolved over hundreds of years.
She uses anthropomorphism as her device, which is sure to disturb some pure scientists, but she does it in a unique way. Although the book's subtitle says Stutchbury investigates the "secret" life of birds, she really compares their "love" lives with our own. Early on, she writes about the male superb fairy-wren, who endears himself to his potential mate by showing off his blue crown, cheeks and back, while holding a bright yellow flower in his beak. For its part, the blue-footed booby performs a "salute landing" to impress the girls. Standing before his mate, he flings up one large blue foot, while standing on the other leg.
These are just two of the courting practices she describes before explaining how recent advances in DNA testing have proved that cute, innocent, migratory songbirds are promiscuous as all get out. Stutchbury refers to infidelity as "cuckoldry," which contributes to the book's endearing quality. "The group of birds with the dubious honour of being the most active in cuckoldry is the passerines, or songbirds," she writes, "where 86 per cent of species are guilty of infidelity."
In fact, for some females, it's not unusual that each of her eggs has been fertilized by a different male, none of which is her actual mate. It's a situation made possible by how birds copulate, something else this science professor describes for those interested in knowing those sorts of things.
But rather than simply tell us that songbirds sleep around, she gives personal accounts of the elaborate field testing that she and other ornithologists do to learn about these behaviours. Using microphones, cameras, decoys, nest traps and other tricks of the trade, they spend hours skulking about in tropical and temperate forests where mosquitoes, killer bees, snakes and ants - and boredom, for that matter - don't deter them. Her ornithologist husband, Gene Morton, for example, ended up with a botfly larva growing in his neck. She knew what it was because "the tiny white beast" kept peeking out of the centre of the red sore.
Once Stutchbury entrances you with a bird's astounding behaviour and impresses you with what it took to make the discovery - just when your sympathy is at its highest - she throws in the bad news. "About 40 per cent of the hayfields … are mowed early each summer," she writes, "artificially changing the delicate interplay of male competition for mates, and, by lowering nesting success, also driving population declines of the species."
It took me a few pages to get comfortable with her sincere tone, and as I neared the end of the book all of the field trials and discoveries start to sound remarkably similar. But the anthropomorphism worked for me. I was interested to learn that divorce is quite common in some types of birds. "Marriages" among greater flamingos, for instance, are almost certain to fail, whereas albatross virtually never split up.
Young albatross, who seldom mate before turning 8, engage in an elaborate ceremony that is repeated dozens of times over about two years before a couple bonds. Once mated, a parent may fly low over the ocean for 2,000 kilometres in search of food for its young. To which Stutchbury adds, "Tragically, the birds are completely unable to adapt their behaviour to overcome deaths caused by long-line fishing." Today, 19 of 22 albatross species are threatened with extinction.
High testosterone levels lead to aggressive male behaviour, and husbands sneak off while their wives sit patiently on the nest. But the boys aren't all bad. Many of them spend equal time incubating eggs, and others return "home" to help mom and dad mind the new batch of chicks.
As I read The Bird Detective, I found myself thinking about many friends and colleagues who would enjoy Stutchbury's stories and benefit from knowing more about how climate change and other environmental threats are affecting these vulnerable creatures. There is plenty to engage the most serious keeper of bird lists, as well as those, such as me, who are content to simply observe these remarkable creatures as they flock to our backyard feeders.
Nicola Ross finally understands how birds do it. She is the editor-in-chief of Alternatives Journal, Canada's national magazine about environmental ideas and action.