in England. Its brilliant white belly, protective grey-brown back,
rippleless and effortless diving, long neck, and splendid ruff and
ear-tufts of black, chestnut, and white, conspire to make it a marked
bird. In the winter the crest is small, and even when fully grown
in spring it is usually held close down against the head, so as to
be not at all conspicuous. When it is spread, it is almost, without
exception, in the service of courtship or love-making. Ten years ago I
spent my spring holiday watching these birds on the Tring reservoirs.
I soon found out that their courtship, like the Herons’, was mutual,
not one-sidedly masculine as in Peacocks or fowls. It consisted most
commonly in a little ceremony of head-shaking. The birds of a pair
come close, face one another, raise their necks, and half-spread
their ruffs. Then, with a little barking note, they shake their heads
rapidly, following this by a slow swinging of them from side to
side. This alternate shaking and swinging continues perhaps a dozen
or twenty times; and the birds then lower their standards, become
normal everyday creatures, and betake themselves to their fishing or
resting or preening again. This is the commonest bit of love-making;
but now and then the excitement evident even in these somewhat casual
ceremonies is raised to greater heights and seems to reinforce itself.
The little bouts of shaking are repeated again and again. I have seen
over eighty succeed each other uninterruptedly. And at the close the
birds do not relapse into ordinary life. Instead, they raise their
ruffs still further, making them almost Elizabethan in shape. Then one
bird dives; then the other: the seconds pass. At last, after perhaps
half or three-quarters of a minute (half a minute is a long time when
one is thus waiting for a bird’s reappearance!) one after the other
they emerge. Both hold masses of dark brownish-green weed, torn from
the bottom of the pond, in their beaks, and carry their heads down
and back on their shoulders, so that either can scarcely see anything
of the other confronting it save the concentric colours of the raised
ruff. In this position they swim together. It is interesting to see
the eager looks of the first-emerged, and its immediate start towards
the second when it too reappears. They approach, rapidly, until the
watcher wonders what will be done to avert a collision. The answer
is simple: there is no averting of a collision! But the collision is
executed in a remarkable way: the two birds, when close to each other,
leap up from the water and meet breast to breast, almost vertical,
suddenly revealing the whole flashing white under-surface. They keep
themselves in this position by violent splashings of the feet, rocking
a little from side to side as if dancing, and very gradually sinking
down (always touching with their breasts) towards the horizontal.
Meanwhile, they exchange some of the weed they are carrying; or at
least nibbling and quick movements of the head are going on. And so
they settle down on to the water, shake their heads a few times more,
and separate, changing back from these performers of an amazing age-old
rite--age-old but ever fresh--into the feeding- and sleeping-machines
of every day, but leaving a vision of strong emotion, canalized into
the particular forms of this dive and dance. The whole performance
impresses the watcher not only with its strength, but as being
apparently of very little direct (though possibly much indirect)
biological advantage, the action being self-exhausting, not stimulating
to further sexual relations, and carried out, it would seem, for its
own sake.
Further acquaintance with the Grebe only deepened the interest and made
clearer the emotional tinge underlying all the relations of the sexes.
This bird, too, has its “greeting ceremony”; but since, unlike the
colonial Herons and Egrets, it makes every effort to conceal its nest,
this cannot take place at its most natural moment, that of nest-relief,
but must be made to happen out on the open water where there are no
secrets to betray. If the sitting bird wishes to leave the nest, and
the other does not return, it flies off, after covering the eggs with
weed, in search of its mate; it is common in the breeding season to see
a Grebe in the “search-attitude,” with neck stretched up and slightly
forward and ear-tufts erected, emitting a special and far-carrying
call. When this call is recognized and answered, the two birds do
nothing so simple as to fly or swim to each other, but a special and
obviously exciting ceremony is gone through. The bird that has been
searched for and found puts itself into a very beautiful attitude, with
wings half-spread and set at right angles to the body, ruff erected
circularly, and head drawn back upon the shoulders, so that nothing
is visible but the brilliant rosette of the spread ruff in the centre
of the screen of wings, each wing showing a broad bar of brilliant
white on its dusk-grey surface. In this position it swings restlessly
back and forth in small arcs, facing towards its mate. The discoverer
meanwhile has dived; but, swimming immediately below the surface of the
water, its progress can be traced by the arrowy ripple it raises. Now
and again it lifts its head and neck above the water, periscope-wise,
to assure itself of its direction, and resumes its subaqueous course.
Nor does it rise just in front of the other bird; but swims under and
just beyond, and, as its mate swings round to the new orientation,
emerges in a really extraordinary attitude. At the last it must have
dived a little deeper; for now it appears perpendicularly from the
water, with a slowish motion, slightly spiral, the beak and head
pressed down along the front of the neck. I compared it in my notes
of ten years ago with “the ghost of a Penguin,” and that comparison
is still the best I can think of to give some idea of the strange
unreality of its appearance. It then settles down upon the water and
the pair indulge in one of their never-failing bouts of head-shaking.
Two mated birds rejoin each other after a few hours’ separation. Simple
enough in itself--but what elaboration of detail, what piling on of
little excitements, what purveying of thrills!
Other emotions too can be well studied in this bird, notably jealousy.
Several times I have seen little scenes like the following enacted.
A pair is floating idly side by side, necks drawn right down so that
the head rests on the centre of the back. One--generally, I must
admit, it has been the cock, but I think the hen may do so too on
occasion--rouses himself from the pleasant lethargy, swims up to
his mate, places himself in front of her, and gives a definite, if
repressed, shake of the head. It is an obvious sign of his desire to
“have a bit of fun”--to go through with one of those bouts of display
and head-shaking in which pleasurable emotion clearly reaches its
highest level in the birds’ lives, as any one who has watched their
habits with any thoroughness would agree. It also acts, by a simple
extension of function, as an informative symbol. The other bird knows
what is meant; it raises its head from beneath its wing, gives a
sleepy, barely discernible shake--and replaces the head. In so doing
it puts back the possibility of the ceremony and the thrill into its
slumbers; for it takes two to make love, for Grebe as for human. The
cock swims off; but he has a restless air, and in a minute or so is
back again, and the same series of events is run through. This may be
repeated three or four times.
If now another hen bird, unaccompanied by a mate, reveals herself to
the eye of the restless and disappointed cock, he will make for her and
try the same insinuating informative head-shake on her; and, in the
cases that I have seen, she has responded, and a bout of shaking has
begun. Flirtation--illicit love, if you will; for the Grebe, during
each breeding season at least, is strictly monogamous, and the whole
economics of its family life, if I may use the expression, are based on
the co-operation of male and female in incubation and the feeding and
care of the young. On the other hand, how natural and how human! and
how harmless--for there is no evidence that the pretty thrills of the
head-shaking display ever lead on to anything more serious.
But now observe. Every time that I have seen such a flirtation start,
it has always been interrupted. The mate, so sleepy before, yet must
have had one eye open all the time. She is at once aroused to action:
she dives, and attacks the strange hen after the fashion of Grebes,
from below, with an underwater thrust of the sharp beak in the belly.
Whether the thrust ever goes home I do not know. Generally, I think,
the offending bird becomes aware of the danger just in time, and,
squawking, hastily flaps off. The rightful mate emerges. What does she
do now? Peck the erring husband? Leave him in chilly disgrace? Not a
bit of it! She approaches with an eager note, and in a moment the two
are hard at it, shaking their heads; and, indeed, on such occasions you
may see more vigour and excitement thrown into the ceremony than at any
other time.
Again we exclaim, how human! And again we see to what a pitch of
complexity the bird’s emotional life is tuned.
It will have been observed that in the Grebe, whose chief skill lies
in its wonderful powers of diving, these powers have been utilized as
the raw material of several of the courtship ceremonies. This pressing
of the everyday faculties of the bird into the service of emotion, the
elevation and conversion of its useful powers of diving and underwater
swimming into ceremonials of passion, is from an evolutionary point
of view natural enough, and has its counterparts elsewhere. So in
the Divers, not too distant relatives of the Grebes, swimming and
diving have their rôle in courtship. Here too the thrilling, vertical
emergence close to the mate takes place; and there is a strange
ceremony in which two or three birds plough their way through the water
with body set obliquely--hinder parts submerged, breast raised, and
neck stretched forward and head downward with that strange look of
rigidity or tension often seen in the courtship actions of birds.
Or, again, I once saw (strangely enough from the windows of the
Headmaster’s house at Radley!) the aerial powers of the Kestrel
converted to the uses of courtship. The hen bird was sitting in a large
bush beyond the lawn. A strong wind was blowing, and the cock again
and again beat his way up against it, to turn when nearly at the house
and bear down upon the bush in an extremity of speed. Just when it
seemed inevitable that he would knock his mate off her perch and dash
himself and her into the branches, he changed the angle of his wings
to shoot vertically up the face of the bush; then turned and repeated
the play. Sometimes he came so near to her that she would start back,
flapping her wings, as if really fearing a collision. The wind was so
strong--and blowing away from me--that I could not hear what cries may
have accompanied the display.
A friend of mine who knows the Welsh mountains and is a watcher of
birds as well, tells me that he has there seen the Peregrine Falcons
do the same thing: the same thing--except that the speed was perhaps
twice as great, and the background a savage rock precipice instead of a
Berkshire garden.
Not only the activities of everyday life, but also those of
nest-building, are taken and used to build up the ceremonies of
courtship; but whereas in the former case the actions are simply those
which are most natural to and best performed by the bird, in the latter
there is, no doubt, actual association between the cerebral centres
concerned with nest-building and with sexual emotion in general. Thus
we almost invariably find the seizing of nest-material in the beak as
a part of courtship, and this is often extended to a presentation of
the material to the mate. This we see in the Grebes, with the dank
weeds of which their sodden nest is built; the Divers use moss in the
construction of theirs, and the mated birds repair to moss banks,
where they nervously pluck the moss, only to drop it again or throw it
over their shoulder. Among the Warblers, the males pluck or pick up a
leaf or twig, and with this in their beak hop and display before the
hens; and the Peewit plucks frenziedly at grass and straws. The Adelie
Penguins, so well described by Dr. Levick, make their nests of stones,
and use stones in their courtship.
A curious, unnatural transference of object may sometimes be seen in
these Penguins. The normal course of things is for this brave but comic
creature, having picked up a stone in its beak, to come up before
another of opposite sex, and, with stiff bow and absurdly outstretched
flippers, to deposit it at the other’s feet. When, however, there are
men near the rookery, the birds will sometimes in all solemnity come
up to them with their stone offering and lay it at the feet of the
embarrassed or amused human being.
The Adelies do not nest by their natural element the sea, but some way
away from it on stony slopes and rock patches; thus they cannot employ
their brilliant dives and feats of swimming in courtship, but content
themselves, apart from this presentation of household material, with
what Dr. Levick describes as “going into ecstasy”--spreading their
flippers sideways, raising their head quite straight upwards, and
emitting a low humming sound. This a bird may do when alone, or the two
birds of a pair may make a duet of it. In any case, the term applied
to it by its observer well indicates the state of emotion which it
suggests and no doubt expresses.
The depositing of courtship offerings before men by the Penguins shows
us that there must be a certain freedom of mental connection in birds.
Here an act, properly belonging to courtship, is performed as the
outlet, as it were, of another and unusual emotion. The same is seen
in many song-birds, who, like the Sedge Warbler, sing loudly for anger
when disturbed near their nest; or in the Divers, who, when an enemy is
close to the nest, express the violence of their emotion by short sharp
dives which flip a fountain of spray into the air--a type of dive also
used as a sign of general excitement in courtship.
Or, again, the actions may be performed for their own sake, as we may
say: because their performance, when the bird is full of energy and
outer conditions are favourable, gives pleasure. The best-known example
is the song of song-birds. This, as Eliot Howard has abundantly shown,
is in its origin and essential function a symbol of possession, of a
nesting territory occupied by a male--to other males a notice that
“trespassers will be prosecuted,” to females an invitation to settle,
pair, and nest. But in all song-birds, practically without exception,
the song is by no means confined to the short period during which it
actually performs these functions, but is continued until the young are
hatched, often to be taken up again when they have flown, or after the
moult, or even, as in the Song Thrush, on almost any sunny or warm day
the year round.
And finally this leads on to what is perhaps the most interesting
category of birds’ actions--those which are not merely sometimes
performed for their own sake, although they possess other and
utilitarian function, but actually have no other origin or _raison
d’être_ than to be performed for their own sake. They represent, in
fact, true play or sport among ourselves; and seem better developed
among birds than among mammals, or at least than among mammals below
the monkey. True that the cat plays with the mouse, and many young
mammals, like kittens, lambs, and kids, are full of play; but the
playing with the mouse is more like the singing of birds outside the
mating season, a transference of a normal activity to the plane of
play; and the play of young animals, as Groos successfully exerted
himself to show, is of undoubted use. To be sure, the impulse to play
must be _felt_ by the young creature as an exuberance of emotion and
spirits demanding expression; but a similar impulse must be felt for
all instinctive actions. Psychologically and individually, if you like,
the action is performed for its own sake; but from the standpoint
of evolution and of the race it has been originated, or at least
perfected, as a practice ground for immature limbs and a training and
keeping ready of faculties that in the future will be needed in earnest.
We shall best see the difference between mammals’ and birds’ behaviour
by giving some examples. A very strange one I saw in a pond near the
Egret rookery in Louisiana. Here, among other interesting birds,
were the Darters or Water Turkeys, curious-looking relatives of the
Cormorants, with long, thin, flexible neck, tiny head, and sharp beak,
who often swim with all the body submerged, showing nothing but the
snake-like neck above water. One of these was sitting on a branch of
swamp-cedar, solitary and apparently tranquil. But this tranquillity
must have been the cloak of boredom. For suddenly the bird, looking
restlessly about her (it was a hen), began to pluck at the little green
twigs near by. She pulled one off in her beak, and then, tossing her
head up, threw it into the air, and with dexterous twist caught it
again in her beak as it descended. After five or six successful catches
she missed the twig. A comic sideways and downward glance at the twig,
falling and fallen, in meditative immobility; and then another twig
was broken off, and the same game repeated. She was very clever at
catching; the only bird that I have seen come up to her was a Toucan in
the Zoo which could catch grapes thrown at apparently any speed. But
then the Toucan had been specially trained--and had the advantage of a
huge capacity of bill!
Here again it might, of course, be said that the catching of twigs is
a practice for beak and eye, and helps keep the bird in training for
the serious business of catching fish. This is no doubt true; but, as
regards the evolution of the habit, I incline strongly to the belief
that it must be quite secondary--that the bird, desirous of occupying
its restless self in a satisfying way, fell back upon a modification of
its everyday activities, just as these are drawn upon in other birds
to provide much of the raw material of courtship. There is no evidence
that young Darters play at catching twigs as preparation for their
fishing, and until there is evidence of this it is simpler to think
that the play habit here, instead of being rooted by the utilitarian
dictates of natural selection in the behaviour of the species, as with
kids or kittens, is a secondary outcome of leisure and restlessness
combining to operate with natural aptitude--in other words, true sport,
of however simple a kind.
The commonest form of play in birds is flying play. Any one who has
kept his eyes open at the seaside will have seen the Herring Gulls
congregate in soaring intersecting spirals where the cliff sends the
wind upwards. But such flights are nothing compared with those of other
birds. Even the staid black-coated Raven may sometimes be seen to go
through a curious performance. One I remember, all alone, flying along
the side of a mountain near Oban; but instead of progressing in the
conventional way, he flew diagonally upwards for a short distance, then
giving a special croak with something of gusto in it, turned almost
completely over on to his back, and descended a corresponding diagonal
in this position. Then with a strong flap of the wings he righted
himself, and so continued until he disappeared round the shoulder of
the hill half a mile on. It reminded me of a child who has learnt some
new little trick of step or dance-rhythm, and tries it out happily all
the way home along the road. Mr. Harold Massingham has seen the Ravens’
games too, and set them down more vividly than I can.[26] He also is
clear that they play for the love of playing, and even believes that
their love of sport has helped their downfall to rarity by rendering
them too easy targets for the gunner.
Or again, at the Egret rookery in Louisiana, at evening when the birds
returned in great numbers, they came back with steady wing-beats along
an aerial stratum about two hundred feet up. Arrived over their nesting
pond, they simply let themselves drop. Their plumes flew up behind like
a comet’s tail; they screamed aloud with excitement; and, not far
above the level of the trees, spread the wings so that they caught the
air again, and as result skidded and side-slipped in the wildest and
most exciting-looking curves before recovering themselves with a brief
upward glide and settling carefully on the branches. This certainly had
no significance for courtship; and I never saw it done save over the
pond at the birds’ return. It seemed to be simply an entertaining bit
of sport grafted on to the dull necessity of descending a couple of
hundred feet.
Examples could be multiplied: Rooks and Crows, our solemn English
Heron, Curlew, Swifts, Snipe--these and many others have their own
peculiar flying sports. What is clear to the watcher is the emotional
basis of these sports--a joy in controlled performance, and excitement
in rapidity of motion, in all essentials like the pleasure to us of a
well-hit ball at golf, or the thrill of a rapid descent on sledge skis.
For any one to whom the evolution theory is one of the master-keys
to animate nature, there must be an unusual interest in tracing out
the development of lines of life that, like the birds’, have diverged
comparatively early from the line which eventually and through many
vicissitudes led to Man.
In the birds as in the mammals, and quite separately in the two groups,
we see the evolution not only of certain structural characters such as
division of heart, compactness of skeleton, increase of brain-size,
not only of physiological characters like warm-bloodedness or
efficiency of circulation, but also of various psychical characters.
The power of profiting by experience becomes greater, as does that of
distinguishing between objects; and there is most markedly an increase
in the intensity of emotion. It has somehow been of advantage, direct
or indirect, to birds to acquire a greater capacity for affection, for
jealousy, for joy, for fear, for curiosity. In birds the advance on the
intellectual side has been less, on the emotional side greater: so that
we can study in them a part of the single stream of life where emotion,
untrammelled by much reason, has the upper hand.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chance, E., ’22. “The Cuckoo’s Secret.” London, 1922.
Darwin, C., ’71. “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to
Sex.” London, 1871.
Groos, K., ’98. “The Play of Animals.” New York, 1898.
Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.
Hudson, W. H., ’12. “The Naturalist in La Plata” (5th Ed.).
London, 1912.
Huxley, J. S., ’14 and ’23. (Courtship in Birds) Proc. Zool. Soc.,
1914, and Proc. Linn. Soc., 1923.
Kirkman, F. B. (ed.), ’10. “British Bird Book.” London, 1910.
Levick, G. M., ’14. “Antarctic Penguins.” London, 1914.
Massingham, H. J., ’23. “The Ravens.” _Nation and Athenæum._
London, 21st April, 1923.
Selous, E., ’01. “Bird Watching.” London, 1901.
Selous, E., ’05. “Bird Life Glimpses.” London, 1905.
FOOTNOTE:
[26] Massingham, ’23.
IV
SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY
SEX: THREE WAYS
That body has for soul an air-balloon
Which drifts with every spiritual blast,
Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at last
Though overmuch aspiring toward the moon.
This other soul, below the animal,
Bloating and coating body’s baser parts
With the manure of its desires and arts,
Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.
I pray that I may still inhabit earth,
Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;
Yet shall I lead my body on to dwell
In the eternal land of second birth,
If, nought contemned, each part of being’s whole
Is taken up in my transmuting soul.
SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY[27]
“And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.”
--W. WORDSWORTH.