An Interview with Dave Bontrager by Chris Roth
Dave Bontrager is an ornithologist and ecologist who has educated and inspired many fledgling (and no-longer-fledgling) birders and nature-lovers for the past three decades. Twelve years ago, he and his wife Charlotte moved from southern California, where Dave had been stationed at Starr Ranch Audubon Sanctuary, to a forty-acre site just three miles up Lost Creek from us. Since their move, he has continued teaching classes at Starr Ranch, commuting south for multiple-week courses. For the past three years, he has also offered regular bird identification and natural history classes to local Dexter and Eugene-area residents. I've enrolled in every one, for good reason: Dave's knowledge, insight, and enthusiasm for his subject have enriched my life and greatly accelerated my own learning about birds and natural history.
On the day before the following interview, a group of four of us visited Dave to help him plant native shrubs and trees in a formerly blackberry-infested creekside floodplain, as part of the ongoing habitat restoration and diversification work that he has done for the past twelve years. (Last year he and Charlotte were awarded the Fish and Wildlife Steward Award for Non-Industrial Forest Lands in Northwest Oregon by the Oregon Departments of Fish and Wildlife and of Forestry.) This interview was conducted the following afternoon, February 9, 2005, sitting in sunshine next to the creek not far from our planting site.
I first asked Dave about what led him to study birds and other wildlife.
DB: When I was in high school, I took a biology class, and I liked it a whole lot. I told the teacher, "You know, I think I'd like to teach biology some time." Because I'd shown that interest, he arranged to have me taken out of study hall and assist him in his class during that hour. It was really neat. He gave me some old textbooks. I was sitting at home--this was in northern Indiana, in winter--and I was looking through this book, and I came to the page that showed twigs in winter. It had all the parts labeled. And I found that kind of amazing. I had thought, "What could be left? The leaves are gone and it's just this twig." I took that book out and I went to a Chinese elm tree that we had in our back yard, and I found most of those structures. That was when I realized that books can give you answers about nature.
I had been out in nature from an early age. I lived in a rural area with lakes and creeks, and my parents were willing to give me a very free rein. So I connected with nature at a very young age. The bookish part came later and it felt like the natural thing to do. I didn't really know what I was interested in; I only knew I was interested in being outdoors, and this put it within some sort of framework, some organization. That's when I decided I wanted to be a biologist. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I studied biology in college.
There was a short period of time, though, when I wasn't sure I was going to be a biologist. When I got my bachelor's degree, it was 1967, and I felt, "You're not helping people by being a biologist," so I went to work as a social worker for several years. Like a lot of other young people at that time, I wanted to save the world, I guess. It was a totally invaluable experience; I wouldn't trade it for one day of biology. It really made a difference in my life. But I decided I needed to get back to biology after that.
I started doing mammal field work. That's when I really discovered birds, because where I was doing my thesis had an incredible array of birds. As soon as I finished my Masters on mammals, I started doing research on birds. Then I began teaching in '77. My first classes were bird classes, and then after several years, I started teaching a class called field natural history and ecology, and then a native plant class, and others like that. You can't study birds without knowing about the plants, and so I suddenly realized I was at a point where I could teach these other classes.
I had told Dave that I wanted to interview him about "family values" among birds. Not surprisingly, however, the main part of our conversation encompassed much more than facts about bird behavior. Dave started by offering some reflections on the concept of "family values" itself:
DB: The term "family values" can have all kinds of meanings. To me, that's become a loaded phrase, and maybe you've chosen it purposely. And when you take words like that, which now have such a deep and emotional meaning to humans, and you apply them to wildlife, you're not only taking the usual risk of anthropomorphizing wildlife, you're adding this new meaning into the equation too.
As a biologist, I--it depends on what audience I'm in front of--if I'm in front of one of my classes, I reserve the right to anthropomorphize at the drop of a hat. But I do need to stop occasionally, just in case someone is misunderstanding, to say that we are applying human values and judgments to these animals, and you can never understand them if you do that, as far as I'm concerned. It's impossible to look at an animal from any perspective other than a human being's, but as a biologist I know that if I say I'm really doing science, I need to do everything under the sun not to humanize wildlife. And incidentally, I realize that many of your readers may take exception to this.
It's been said that the moment we become an observer, we change the situation. In other words, it's impossible as human beings to not bring ourselves into the equation. All we are is humans; that's all we can use to interpret animal behavior; but they're not humans, and so perhaps we can never really understand them.
CR: I did deliberately choose the term "family values" because it has so many different interpretations. One reason I thought of looking at birds or other wildlife was that it seems as if there's a wide range of acceptable behaviors, or just natural behaviors, for different species. To learn about those may be somewhat of a challenge to someone who is used to judging a certain set of behaviors as correct or showing "good family values," with other behaviors being not good. Perhaps learning to see what is among animals will encourage people to suspend their judgment a little bit more, even in regard to people, and to try to understand, rather than immediately judge. But it's also tricky, because we're still applying human terms when we're talking about the animals.
DB: And they're not talking to us, and telling us the right way of describing things.
CR: I was curious: while trying not to anthropomorphize, what are some of the variations among bird species in their relationships to their families, particularly in the areas of mating and parenting?
DB: Well, maybe the place to start answering that is to look at the various types of pair bonds. We were joking the other day...hummingbirds probably have as short a pair bond as you could ever have. If the pair of birds has seen each other before, it's probably only been in circumstances that were mainly aggression, because if the female happened to be on the male's territory, and she were too close to food plants, then he would just chase her away. But at some point, it's the right time of the year, and hormones kick in and start influencing that behavior. The male does a display--hummingbirds do have pretty elaborate displays for small birds--and the female is receptive or is not receptive. She is the one that makes the choice--as is true in almost all birds, people now believe. And when she makes that choice, there's copulation. He may stick around, do some more displaying, they may copulate a second or third time, but then that is literally it. They've been together for a matter of maybe several minutes, and that's the extent of that.
Some other birds are also that way, but those tend to be in the minority. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the larger birds, particularly, bond for life. Geese are well known for this, and humans get very anthropomorphic and emotional about it. I think most humans find that bonding for life is a positive thing; it's what you're supposed to do. But the reality is, once you start studying birds and learning about them, there's really not a lot of romance or...well, let's put it this way: when one of those birds dies, it's not as if the other one pines away the rest of their life. Assuming they're not so old that they're not attractive to another bird, then they form another pair bond, and presumably don't sit around thinking about the one that has passed away.
So even when you hear the term "mate for life," it really means "have a pair bond until one of the birds dies"--and then a new pair bond will be formed. Part of what's believed to be behind the formation of pair bonds, and one bird accepting another, is that there's some inner instinctive drive to pass your genetics on into the future. It's a pretty cold interpretation of things by human standards. It's not romance, and it's not love, and all of that--it's pass your genes on to the next generation. And that's why pair bonds are quickly filled or replaced if a bird disappears.
There is such a thing--and this word is even used a lot in biology; some biologists hate to hear this word, but others use it freely--as divorce. Divorce happens; there is an existing bond and one of the birds leaves. Most of the time it's the female that leaves, because, at least in songbirds, it's the male that's tied not only to a particular female but to a place, since the males are the birds that principally defend the place. But the female, trying to pass those genes on, for whatever reason--I'm not sure how a female perceives this and then makes the decision to leave--but it's as though she thinks, "This is not working. We're not going to produce young," and so she may leave and wander around until she finds a male that doesn't have a mate. I've seen that many times during my research, where I've had color-banded birds so I knew exactly who's where and with whom. It's pretty interesting stuff to follow.
CR: Why would it be in the interests of the species to pass on genes by having exclusive pair bonds, as opposed to having as many different choices as possible?
DB: I believe it's similar to why birds have territories. When you study birds for a while, songbirds let's say, you're amazed at how organized everything is. There's a lot of flexibility, but there's still this incredible organization out there, and you come to understand how important that really is. For a little animal to successfully reproduce takes an incredible amount of energy--particularly for the female. She's not only trying to get enough food to keep herself going, but she needs to be eating a lot of food because she has to produce these eggs, and she's going to be spending more time on the nest, not out feeding like the male can, and then later on she'll be feeding the young, which the male may or may not do. But the male also, on the other hand, if he's defending the territory, has to be fit. I don't know how else it could be organized or disorganized, but if there weren't territories, you can envision these birds just wandering all over the place, probably expending a lot of energy against each other, whereas if you set out these nice territories, you're not eliminating conflict, but you're reducing it dramatically.
CR: The territories go along with the pair bonds; they're part of the same system.
DB: Yes.
CR: So what would you say is the percentage of birds that have that system as opposed to some other system? I guess there's the hummingbird system, but they still have territories, right?
DB: Yes, the male has a feeding territory that he defends after reproduction. That can be several large shrubs that happen to have a lot of flowers on them, or it can be many shrubs spread out over a large area. The female hummingbird defends an area around the nest from other hummingbirds.
CR: Are there cases of "multiple relationships"?
DB: Yes, there's some really interesting stuff that goes on. Monogamy is definitely the most common type of bond in most birds, but there is polygamy, and that's the term that's used.
In polygamy, one male may mate with multiple females. This can occur with, for example, the house wren, which was one of the birds that I studied. We saw this happen: a male house wren has a territory, and within that territory, if he's a very fit male and it's large enough and he can defend it, he can have two or three females. He'll do his best to mate with every one of those if it's possible. There are vast geographic regions where house wrens are monogamous, and then there are other areas where there's a little bit of polygamy, and then there are some places where there's a lot. Where I was studying them there was some, but not a lot. On a study area that was about thirty acres, there were an average of sixteen to twenty males, meaning territories, and in a given year there might be two or three of those males that were polygamous, and all the rest were monogamous. They're cavity-nesters; they build nests in holes all over the place. When the females arrive--because the males almost always come first in the case of migration--the male literally shows them where the nests are. A female selects the one to be used, and then the pair bond is cemented. Except he's always wandering around looking for other females, and taking them to other nest cavities. We never had more than two active nests at one time on a territory, but that was interesting to watch. You're over here at this tree, and there he is, defending the area around the cavity, and then later you're off doing something else, with a different species, and you have a house wren nest there, and you look at it and you go, "Oh, that's red-green, the same one I saw over there a half an hour ago." He's making the rounds, defending nest sites and females from other males...really interesting.
In polyandry, another form of polygamy, one female mates with more than one male. Not real common; it's probably more common in shorebirds than in any other group. It's very unusual in songbirds, which is the group I know the most about.
CR: In terms of parenting...when you were talking about the lack of romance or attachment to a partner when the other bird dies, I was thinking about the movie Winged Migration. In one scene, a young penguin was killed by a hawk, and the parents seemed to be mourning; there seemed to be quite a bit of distress. Is that just anthropomorphizing on our part, or do you think there was a lot of distress there? How attached do parents get to their kids?
DB: That's a tough one. I've seen some pretty amazing things...a western bluebird nest that was predated by a striped racer, which ate all the kids, and the parents were still taking food to that nest cavity the following day, in the middle of the afternoon. They had been in the cavity dozens and dozens of times since all of the young were taken, so they knew the nest was empty, and every time they went into it they saw that. But there is this instinctive drive that was set in motion initially by hormones, that helped create this bond between these birds. Again, it's hard for me to believe that the birds came together for the reason that humans do, for the companionship, for sharing love and the satisfaction of raising young, and all of those things. I don't believe that birds think in these ways. This sounds so cold, but I think chemistry and instinct are what's driving their behavior. However, I want to be real careful what I say because this could end up on a piece of paper, so I don't want to go overboard.
I usually don't talk to people about this, but...the more I learn about an individual bird, the more I may form an emotional bond with it. That's the danger of trying to do biology: at the end of the day, when you're writing the report, you're not talking about that bond, and you're trying to keep it from influencing your results. And I've had interesting experiences that I rarely talk about, where it felt like something was going on between me and the animal...
I've seen many birds going absolutely crazy when there are predators at their nests, but is that the result of loving their young and wanting to protect them, and is it because they're feeling emotion like we might? I really don't know.
CR: Of course, some scientists might say that human beings are really only running on instincts and chemistry too, and have created these elaborate stories for some instinctual or chemical reason to make it romantic--that emotions are all chemical, and...
DB: But being a human being, you're studying human behavior your whole life, without realizing that you're doing it. That's how you learn this is someone that you want to be around, or don't want to be around, or that's bad behavior, that's good behavior. I do tend to think that culture and learning play a much more important role in humans than they do in wildlife. It's really interesting that when animals that seem to form more of a society are studied, it's as if they have a culture--we see this in Jane Goodall's work with chimps, and Diane Fossey's with gorillas. And I don't think it's any coincidence that those are primates, and we're primates; it's something that happens with primates for sure. All you have to do is go to a zoo and look in the face of a gorilla or orangutan--to me it's almost overwhelming. We're not that far apart. Science is still science, but in primate research, it somehow seems that anthropomorphism is more acceptable. I guess it's because we're so much more closely related to these other primates than we are to birds, reptiles, and other wildlife.
But I'm not convinced that those penguins were mourning the attack on their young. On the other hand, I don't think I would say that there isn't some possibility that something like that could be in play. But I do generally believe that the thing that elicits that behavior is determined by instinct and chemistry.
CR: I remember that with the Lazuli bunting, every individual bird creates its own song out of bits and pieces...
DB: It combines something of its own with parts that it borrows.
CR: So that seems like a cultural thing, rather than just an instinctive song. It's something that they've learned and invented.
DB: Or you could take the colder approach and just say that natural selection is involved: that there's some advantage to doing it that way, and that advantage ultimately translates itself into producing more young who then exhibit those traits because they got them from their parents.
CR: How can you decide where to draw the line about where to apply a colder approach, and where to apply a more...
DB: Human approach?
CR: ...yes, a more human approach, a more emotional or spiritual approach? Can that line be drawn?
DB: I'm not so sure it can. It's kind of regrettable to say this, but I think that the more a person learns about wildlife, the less they believe that other animals' behavior is driven by the same things that humans are. Even if you don't want to believe that, when you just see what's going on out there...
Or maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's that, if you're taught the way that you should be, you're told endlessly about the importance of the scientific method--not only because you want to do your best to produce the truth, but because it's very important to science that non-scientists believe that scientists are doing everything they can to produce results that are as close to the truth as a human could hope to get. People are very skeptical of science--the general person on the street, you know? More and more these days, they distrust science, and actually I probably distrust some of the same things they do, the genetic business and all that.
I think that has something to do with where my head is today, because you know how--I don't know if it was this way for you, but I think it was for me--when I first started getting into research and all the education that goes with that, I didn't know what I was doing. I wanted to do the right thing, and so I listened to what the authorities around me told me. Then I worked to do what they were telling me I should do, whether it's the approach to use in research or whatever. And one of the things that you learn there: boy, those people will bleed all over your papers if you start getting anthropomorphic. It'll look like a bloodletting. So you learn that you can't be that way, your results can't be that way--it's science, you know.
But in my case I tend to be an emotional person. After years of research, I think it's easier for me now to conduct research and get emotionally involved but still produce a result that is science, because I know the difference. So, if I write it down, I know I've got to filter all of that stuff. But I can be that way when I'm out in the field and when I'm seeing these things. And it's just wondrous, the things that I've seen.
I had an experience once that I have yet to really try to explain, partly because I don't think I can, maybe, and also because I think it might somehow diminish the significance of it. But I got a leave of absence from the college I was working at after I graduated, and ended up having about fifty consecutive days on this study area. I actually lived there, in a sleeping bag, and fixed my meals out there. That whole period of time, I went into civilization maybe four or five times, for supplies. And when you spend fifty days in a thirty-acre area and you watch the same individual birds day after day, it's just amazing. I guess it's kind of like meditation: you disappear. You go for long periods of time before you realize, "Oh, yeah, I'm Dave, and I'm out here doing this study."
It was pretty amazing stuff, and the shocking part of this to me was that I made observations after a while that told me that some of my previous interpretations were incorrect. I saw that there are relationships in nature that may not reveal themselves without extended study. Almost no one in science can do that kind of extended study, especially these days. That certainly was an emotional experience for me, but that emotion did not get in the way of me seeing things. I came away doubting some results in scientific publications, including my own.
You read a study, and someone's had a limited budget or limited time, or both, and so they've gone out to a couple of sites for a few days separated by long intervals, and they think the sample size is large enough, and I'm not so sure it is. Maybe it's the twelfth day when you start to figure this out, and they've only been out there for three.
Anyway, that was a profound experience, and it's probably never going to happen to me again, but I really wish it could. (Laughter.) I have never been so connected in my life as the last part of that experience. Amazing...
CR: You were talking about the importance placed on the scientific method, which is supposedly very objective, even though we've found out that the observer always influences the experiment. The people training you were saying that you need to hold to this method because otherwise you won't be credible. But there's a huge amount of distrust of science, and particularly science that goes along with this kind of method, without including some sort of bigger story around it. Look at the number of people who believe that the Bible's story of creation is literally true, because it seems to have more oomph or meaning to it than something that seems to be so dry. And I think about native cultures that had a scientific understanding in many ways--an ecological understanding--but also had some myth associated with it that gave the story meaning. Is it time to introduce a little more emotion and story back into science?
DB: Oh, I believe that, absolutely. And there's a handful of people who can do that. I don't know if you've read any of Berndt Heinrich's writing--he does the science, the journals, peer-reviewed papers, all highly regarded, and he also writes books for the layperson that are read just as much by other scientists. They're wonderful. He's the kind of biologist I wish I could be. I don't know how he got where he is. He can do science, but he would have been just as comfortable, and fit in just as well, in Darwin's days, because he's a natural historian too, and you really see that when you read his books. There's a handful of people who can communicate like that. The group I'm talking about isn't really what you would call nature writers; that's another group. This is a group that truly are scientists, and nature writers. They can write for all of us, and do it in a pleasant, readable, sometimes emotional way, without selling out the science that they're supposed to believe in. I don't think it's very easy to do. Actually I don't think nature writing, or writing in general, is very easy to do either.
CR: But there's not only writing. I'm thinking of the last two walks I went to at Mt. Pisgah Arboretum, or your bird classes, where there's an obvious, great, infectious enthusiasm and love of the subject. Even though it is science, it obviously has meaning to the person--who just loves it...
DB: Can't live without it...
CR: ...and yet, somehow, it seems that that's not really the scientific method, to be so enthusiastic about your subject. There's some way in which you were taught not to...
DB: ...be emotional.
Well, I'll tell you, when I got involved in the California gnatcatcher... If you know what it was like when the spotted owl became a big deal here, it was just like that in southern California when the gnatcatcher controversy started. I was right there on the ground floor at that point, and I made a decision that really upset a number of friends of mine. I decided that I was not going to get into the political side of this, because I had already been told by two developers and a person at a government agency that if you want people to believe your research results, you can't be out there leading protests; people won't believe you if you do that; we won't believe you if you do that. Well, I think their motivation was pretty sh-tty, because they didn't want the guy who at the time--for that very brief period of time--was the world's expert on the California gnatcatcher--they didn't want him parading around in the streets.
But I happened to believe what they said, even though their motivation maybe wasn't so honorable. And I think, in the end, that I did the cause more good by not getting involved politically. People stopped coming to me to talk about the political side of things. If they wanted an answer about gnatcatchers, I could give that answer to them. That was a situation where staying out of the emotional side of things was beneficial, and just trying to be a scientist gave me more credibility as a scientist. It still remains to be seen whether the gnatcatcher is going to survive, but it definitely was a help to have that data that would be accepted not by everyone, but by some important people who would have rejected it otherwise.
The day that I decided that I was going to stop studying gnatcatchers was a very traumatic day, because it was also the day that I chose not to renew my federal permits. In order to study an endangered species, you have to have these permits, and when you let them go, getting them back is very difficult. I let them go, and that's when I started looking back on all of that research. The research that I have enjoyed the most was the research that I did at Starr Ranch in the '70s and '80s. There was no politics. There was no funding. It was just me doing what I loved to do. The gnatcatcher thing was not fun, because there was too much politics involved in it, and I do have an emotional response to all of this.
There's a line Andy Goldsworthy says, right at the beginning of Rivers and Tides: "The land"--and I would include the wildlife, and he would too--"I have to have it, I have to..." He's saying, I cannot live without this. And that's the way that I feel. That's why for the first twenty-some days probably, when we got this piece of land, and I would walk around on this land, I would weep, because I could not believe this, that I had the fortune of having this...that this pileated woodpecker was where I live, and all these other birds...Andy and you and I, we can't live without this, we have to have it, and that's pretty emotional.
CR: That might bring us back to family values. It seems as if the connection to the land is a value that traditionally was very tied in with family. But that's something that's not really discussed currently when people talk about family values.
DB: Not at all; I haven't heard anything like that. (Laughter.) Family values, family values...
Birds don't have good family values, I don't think.
CR: According to the standards of what's talked about as family values?
DB: Well...
CR: Wouldn't a family value be supporting and continuing a family in the best way that you can, in which case all of their reproductive strategies would be family values, and supporting their young until they're ready for independence, and then supporting them to become independent...
DB: You can say that; I don't think I would quite say that. Well, I might say it to you, Chris, but I certainly wouldn't stand up in front of a group of scientists and say it, even though I know that probably about forty percent of them feel exactly the same way. That's how they got into science: they loved being out in this and doing stuff.
It feels almost as if there are two separate beings here, with me. I've never really even thought about this, I don't think, or examined it. You can't separate yourself out, obviously, but in a sense, it feels like there's this one person who has done this science and has a few publications, and that's science, and then there's this other one that's talking about bawling his head off when he walks around on this piece of land. They are the same person, but the latter person certainly doesn't show up in that first, in those papers. I don't know, I haven't really examined this in any detail. But you won't hear me using the term family values applied to wildlife...at least I think. Maybe now I might, slip of the tongue... (Laughter.)
CR: We might need to reclaim that word.
DB: Well, I could get away with saying that in front of the classes I teach now, and nobody would argue about it, but you know I also feel a certain responsibility... We pride ourselves at Starr Ranch, whether with six-year-old kids that start with our junior biologists' program, or with the adults that I teach, in giving them science-based study. I think that's important; I think we have a responsibility to do that. Obviously, particularly with kids, you've got to have some fun out there. But we're teaching six-year-olds the scientific method, though they don't really understand that's what it is...I find that exciting, because we also firmly believe that every day those kids come out there, they need to leave having really enjoyed that. If the instructors feel that that's not happening, that's when they get concerned and want to examine that closely and make sure that it does happen. So I could say "family values" in front of these classes now, but that would probably be the fun side of it.
CR: Back on the subject of parenting, I read an article in Smithsonian about California condors that were being raised by humans using puppets. The first round of attempts to raise the young didn't go very well, because the humans were being too nice to the young. The puppets that were supposedly the parents were being very gentle with the young, and so the young, when they grew up, didn't have certain survival skills. They kept getting killed or dying in various situations. And then condor parents were observed being pretty tough, and beating up their young, to try to make them scared enough so that they could survive. From then on, that's what the humans did with the puppets, and the survival rate of the condors they were raising went up dramatically.
DB: Tough love, huh?
CR: Tough love, yeah. So I'm wondering about the range of parenting styles that you've observed or know about among birds.
DB: The birds that I have studied the most are songbirds. With the female gnatcatcher, the average clutch size is four. She lays three eggs and starts incubating after the third. They hatch thirteen to fourteen days later, and then the parents feed them for thirteen to fourteen days, and then they're out of the nest. If it's early in the season, they feed them out of the nest maybe seven to ten days and then that's it, and they go on and try it again.
I think it's more difficult to find emotion and all of these human traits and characters in that family, because that family is here and gone; the young are fledged and gone. At least by our standards, it's not much of a family; it's a very short-lived situation in birds. If you were studying chimps or gorillas, that's another thing altogether.
CR: With the larger migratory birds in Winged Migration, it seems to me that there was a longer-term family association.
DB: Yes, there is. Generally the larger the bird, the longer the association. And then look at penguins and ostriches. They have crèches where the young are herded together in one great big bunch and are cared for by an alternating group of adults. That's kind of interesting when you look at it through human eyes.
CR: Communal parenting...
DB: And those are young that take a long time to mature. Most songbirds are gone in a flash compared to that.
CR: Among humans, some ways of thinking about "family values" exclude certain kinds of behavior. One area this applies to is sexual orientation. Are there cases of homosexuality among birds?
DB: The sexual orientation thing is interesting. There are these exceptional things that happen once in a while. We had it happen with gnatcatchers once, where two females laid in the same nest and shared incubation. There were no males anywhere. There obviously had been males; it was later determined that at least some of the eggs were fertile. But at some point before hatching, the females stopped the nesting process and abandoned the nest. But that was real interesting. It always gets people's attention when you talk about something like that.
CR: You never see two male ducks, or two female ducks, swimming around together?
DB: No, no. And I'm trying to think of any other situations with birds at least. These aren't male-male or female-female pairs, but occasionally you see what's called reverse mounting, or reverse copulation, where maybe initially it's the male on the female, which is what you expect, and then the male gets off and they're sitting on the perch, and the female mounts the male. That's probably not rare, but I don't know what that means, what that's all about. I guess I would just say, if I were trying to interpret that, that there is an excitement that goes along with copulation even in birds. They're both in an excited state, and this might be an outgrowth of that. It's obvious that it's not going to work that way, if they're talking about producing eggs.
CR: And what about the use of consciousness-altering substances? Now I know that birds will get drunk on certain fermented berries...
DB: I think that might be exaggerated a little bit, but yeah, it does happen.
CR: It's not common? Birds are not usually trying to alter their consciousness?
DB: I don't think it's that common. I think I've seen it once here. It was with blackberries, and maybe cascara. There were robins and varied thrushes and hermit thrushes, and they stayed in this one area for a couple of days. There was a lot of activity and a lot of aggression. It's hard to draw the line between how much of that was because they were getting stoned, and how much of it was because there were so many of them at this rich source of food, and there was a lot of defense of that area going on. If the question is, "Do you think that birds would purposely feed on this to get some pleasure or some other kind of experience?"--I don't think so. Saying this in human words, I don't think they have that kind of time, or luxury for that. In the world they live in, given that there are so many things around that want to eat them...I'm just thinking about all those times when I was stoned, if there had been a lot of predators around, I wouldn't be here today, because the last thing on my mind was, "Ooh, I've gotta be alert and watch for something that's going to try to eat me."
CR: That behavior doesn't have a high survival value.
DB: Natural selection would probably take care of that situation.
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(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values